LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



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®§8p*.— . i^ilfs 

Shell*. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



I> 



THE 

CHURCH OF TO-MORROW 

ADDRESSES 

DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 
DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1891 



y 

W. J. DAWSON 

AUTHOR OF 

The Makers of Modern English, The Redemption of Edward 
Strahan, etc. 




NEW YORK: HUNT &> EA TON 

CINCINNA TI: CRANSTON & STOIVE 

1892 






V 



,1-sn 



Copyright, 1892, by 

HUNT & EATON, 

New York. 



Electrotyped, printed, and bound by 

HUNT & EATON, 

150 Fifth Avenue, New York. 



THESE ADDRESSES 

ARE 

DEDICATED 
TO MY OLD FRIENDS IN SCOTLAND 

AND 

MY NEW FRIENDS IN THE NEW WORLD 

AMONG WHOM 

THEY WERE DELIVERED. 



CONTENTS. 



I. PAGE 

Introduction g 

II. 
On Catholicity » . 19 

III. 
Nehushtan: A Study in Iconoclasm 45 

IV. 
The Failure of the Supernatural as a Means 
of Conversion 77 

V. 
Heroic Doubt 103 

VI. 
The Candor of Christ 131 

VII. 
The Socialism of Jesus 157 

VIII. 
The Democratic Christ 183 



6 Contents. 

IX. PAGK 

National Righteousness 221 

X. 

The Blessedness of Womanhood.. 249 

XL 
The Last Analysis of Christianity 277 

XII. 
Wesley and His Work 305 



INTRODUCTION. 



INTRODUCTION. 

In the late Ecumenical Conference at Wash- 
ington the subject allotted to me was " The 
Church of the Future," and I was allowed fif- 
teen minutes for its treatment. Obviously, it 
was not possible to do more than indicate, in 
the most restricted and least qualified way, my 
general ideas of the subject. 

I was able only to suggest what I believed 
would be the four chief characteristics of that 
Church. These were simplification, the demo- 
cratic spirit, social aim, and intellectual and 
organic comprehension. By simplification I 
mean a movement such as we have witnessed 
in science and sociology toward root principles, 
essential truths, the result of which will be to 
separate keenly between the essentials and ac- 
cidentals in Christian truth, and make it possi- 
ble for all religious souls to draw nearer to- 
gether on the basis of those fundamental truths 
upon which all religious souls are agreed. The 
theology of the churches to-day is largely 
manufactured outside the churches. It is the 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

great secular writers of our time who are mak- 
ing the theology of the future. It is idle to 
ignore the influence upon popular thought 
of such writers as Kingsley and George Mac- 
donald, and the still more penetrating influ- 
ence of Carlyle and Ruskin, of Tennyson and 
Browning. The main result of this teaching 
may be summed up in the famous phrase of 
Laurence Oliphant, " Live the life." And 
the present drift of things points to the conclu- 
sion that we are already moving, and even 
rapidly moving, toward those points of simpli- 
fication and combination where the divergences 
and distractions of disputed theologies will be 
forgotten in the harmony of a religion which 
places less stress on dogma and more on life, 
less on creeds and more on character. 

There is no need to define what is meant by 
the democratic and social spirit. Broadly 
speaking, we are all agreed that we are ap- 
proaching, if we have not reached, an age of 
triumphant democracy. The example of 
America has had a wholly incalculable influence 
upon the political conditions of the Old 
World. Every decade adds to the power of 
the people, and the whole trend of modern pol- 
itics is toward their fuller emancipation. But 
democracy in the State means democracy in 
the Church also. It means that in the long 



INTRODUCTION. 1 1 

run the Church which is most frankly demo- 
cratic in its methods must win. Autocracy in 
church government is doomed. Every new 
school which is erected, every new philosoph- 
ical book which is read, every fresh liberty 
which is gained for the masses of the people 
by the actions of senates and parliaments is 
another nail driven into the coffin of autocracy. 
And I think, therefore, that the Church which 
is most frankly, wisely, and genially democratic 
will be the Church of the Future. No Church 
which boasts that it ministers to an intellect- 
ual aristocracy can take a large hold on the 
twentieth century. The Church that touches 
the common people will do that, and the 
Church of the common people cannot fail to 
be the Church of the world. 

Nor is there any need to explain what is 
meant by comprehension. Comprehension is 
the child of apprehension. When we have ap- 
prehended more truly in what the spirit and 
temper of Christ consists, comprehension in 
one organic whole will become possible, and 
not till then. To a dispassionate student of 
Christianity as it exists it must.be a wholly 
amazing thing to note how widely the different 
bodies of Christians are separated, and yet how 
little separates them. In most cases the forces 
of separation spring from organization rather 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

than creed ; and, even where creeds differ, the 
differences are for the most part infinitesimally 
small compared with the agreements. How 
little actually separates the Presbyterian from 
the Congregationalist, or either from the Bap- 
tist or Methodist ! And one may go much 
further, and say how vast is the body of truth 
which the truly pious Romanist holds in com- 
mon with the truly pious Protestant compared 
with the doctrines on which they disagree ! It 
is certain that the Catholic is much nearer the 
Methodist than is either to the Unitarian ; 
and yet even devout Unitarians, such as Chan- 
ning or Martineau, are so essentially and 
thoroughly Christian in sentiment and teach- 
ing that it is hard to discover by their writings 
in what their divergence from the recognized 
Christian bodies really consists. It is the con- 
sideration of these things which leads me to 
hope that we may arrive at some new state- 
ment of truth which may unite all Christians 
in one, and that, in the final reunion of Chris- 
tendom, the truth which dwells in Rome may 
free itself from the corruption, and even Rome 
may not prove forever irreconcilable. This, 
at least, was the hope and aim of Jesus — one 
fold and one Sheperd. 

The great peril in discussing subjects like 
these is obviously that of building a church in 



INTRODUCTION. 1 3 

the clouds, and forgetting the force of facts. 
One almost feels that the facts are an irony 
upon the theory. For instance, English sacer- 
dotalism is marked by a narrower, not a 
broader, vision year by year, and when it uses the 
word comprehension it really means absorption. 
Christ or the Church — which ? is the question 
which tests all, and when that question is 
fairly put, especially in the newer lands of the 
English-speaking race, there can be no doubt 
as to the reply. It is not to the Church, but 
to the living and animating Christ that the 
great majority of those who profess and call 
themselves Christians give allegiance. A com- 
mon center must needs mean a common orbit, 
and, therefore, the dispassionate observer can- 
not but ask again, Why is it there is not more 
unity among those who in the deep things of 
belief are already one? And I answer again 
that, in most cases, it is organizations which 
separate those whom faith unites. Before 
any practical step toward unity can be taken 
we must cease to regard each separate sect as 
a close corporation, each separate ministry as a 
still closer corporation, and any recognition of 
the good points of our neighbor as sectarian 
treason, and any passage across the Rubicon 
of artificial separation for the greater good of 
the whole Church as sectarian treachery. In 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

other words, we must cultivate fellowship, and 
fellowship is a plant which does not flourish 
without cultivation. We must draw closer to- 
gether, and care more for truth and progress 
than for the traditions of organization. When 
disputed measures are to be passed through 
the House of Commons party-leaders gladly 
sacrifice doubtful clauses if they can secure 
assent to those clauses which express funda- 
mental principles. There are a great many 
doubtful clauses in our modern Christianity, 
and it is too much our custom to postpone all 
progress by wrangling over these ; we are stiff- 
backed in our crotchets but lukewarm in our 
principles. 

This is a concise statement of the ground 
covered by my address, and, as I have said, 
the time at my disposal was so limited that 
any attempt at qualification or elaboration was 
impossible. But, as I reflected more and more 
upon the matter, I remembered that for a long 
time past I had been dealing with these ques- 
tions in a more or less incidental way in my 
public ministry. It occurred to me, therefore, 
that at a moment when all the great Meth- 
odist bodies of the world, representing not 
fewer than twenty-five millions of Christians, 
were assembled in fraternal council I could 
not do better than so order my various public 



INTRODUCTION. 1 5 

addresses that they all bore upon this fascinat- 
ing theme. The addresses thus delivered now 
find a place in this volume. With one or two 
exceptions all have been preached to Ameri- 
can or Canadian audiences. It is right to re- 
mark that in altered forms some of the ad- 
dresses had been previously delivered to my 
own countrymen — the sermon on Wesley in 
St. Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh, on the Cen- 
tenary of Wesley's death ; that on Progress 
by Iconoclasm before the University of Glas- 
gow, and that on the Socialism of Jesus in the 
Maxwell Parish Church, Glasgow, as one of a 
series on socialism. I do not pretend that 
they all strictly conform to the title of this vol- 
ume, but I think they have a unity which is 
based upon their general aim and spirit, and I 
publish them for two purposes ; first, that they 
may assist in the march of a catholic and 
Christian progress; and, secondly, as a me- 
mento of the generous reception afforded me 
by the churches of the United States and 
Canada. 



There are so many kinds of voices in the world, and none 
of them is without signification. — St, Paul> \ Cor. xiv, 10. 

Forth from the midst of Babel brought, 

Parties and sects I leave behind, 
Enlarged my heart, and free my thought 

Whene'er the latent truth I find, 
The latent truth with joy to own, 

And bow to Jesu's name alone.— John Wesley. 

2 



J 



II. 

ON CATHOLICITY. 

HOW are we to have a creed and yet avoid 
rigidity of thought ? How are we to hold 
with all the passion of the soul vital principles, 
and yet be tolerant of variations of belief and 
principles in others? How, in a word, are we 
to reconcile conscientious conviction with 
catholic temper? To those questions St. Paul 
furnishes the only possible reply. He shows 
us that fidelity to principle need not mean nar- 
rowness of outlook, nor devotion to God con- 
tempt of the world. There are, or should be t 
for every man convictions that admit of no ^ 
mediation. 

11 Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest, 
Cannot confound, nor doubt him, nor deny ; 

Yea, with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest, 
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I." 

But the deep-natured man will recollect that 
the Spirit blows as it listeth, and while it 
brings life to all, may bring many different 
forms of life, just as the same wind of spring 



2Q ON CATHOLICITY. 

calls into various being the grass-blade and the 
violet, the foliage of the bramble and the oak. 

CThe remedy for intolerance is very simple — 
remember other people. Remember how 
large the world is and how small are you. 
Learn to be broad-natured and not one-sided. 

With the argument of this particular sec- 
tion of the Corinthians in its special bearing on 
Corinthian church-life we need not seriously 
concern ourselves. Like so much of St. Paul's 
writing the incidental rises into the essential 
— the page meant to deal with some transient 
condition of things suddenly flashes forth the 
star-birth of some great illuminating principle, 
which is good for all time. Put in the briefest 
phrase, the argument of St. Paul is for intelli- 
gibility of speech. For it is a prostitution of 
speech when language is used without thought 
and meaning — when the aim of the speaker is 
/ rather to attract men by the marvel of his 
\ words than the truth of his message. It is 
worse than this in the minister of the Gospel, 
it is an equal mockery of God and man — of 
God, whose message is betrayed; and of man, 
whose desires are disappointed. It was of 
such a practice that Milton wrote with bitter 
truth, " The hungry sheep look up and are not 
fed." It is this vainglorious habit of using un- 
intelligent words of which St. Paul speaks in 



ON CATHOLICITY. 21 

this chapter, and says, with stinging emphasis, 
" I had rather speak five words with my under- 4 
standing, that by my voice I might teach * 
others also, than ten thousand words in an J 
unknown tongue." 

But here another and a very natural thought 
suggests itself. That which is unintelligible 
to one may be intelligible enough to some one 
else, for the mind and heart of man have 
many dialects, even as music utters itself 
through many instruments. Much of the 
speech of an educated man must always be 
unintelligible to the illiterate man, because the 
wider a man's culture is the larger and more 
various does his vocabulary become. When 
Wordsworth, for instance, set himself to write 
in the exact language of common life he set 
himself an impossible task, because he was not 
a common man, and it was not possible for 
him to restrict himself to the bald and narrow 
vocabulary of the peddler or the peasant. The 
most he could do was to treat of simple themes 
in a simple spirit, but by the very urgency of 
his own genius he was bound to use hundreds 
of words which a Cumbrian laborer would 
neither use nor comprehend. This, then, is 
the thought that occurs to the acute mind 
of Paul, that when we say a certain speaker is 
unintelligible we must remember that, though 



22 ON CATHOLICITY. 

unintelligible to us, he may be intelligible to 
some one else. The world is too big a place 
for one sort of speech to suit every body. 
Mind acts upon mind, and the Spirit of God 
acts upon men through a thousand channels 
and by means and dialects which are always 
changing. It does not follow that because a 
man is unintelligible to you that he is so 
to others, that because he cannot preach 
to you that, therefore, he is called to 
preach to no one. The world is full of 
voices — tender, stern, startling — some falling 
on tired hearts like a mother 's comforting, 
some ringing like a trumpet peal that makes 
the pulses leap, some speaking in arraignment 
of our slothfulness, and some of our restless- 
ness ; voices appealing in turn to the intellect, 
the heart, the conscience, calling us to the vis- 
ion of knowledge or of love or duty — some 
speaking roughly and plainly, so that the way- 
faring man may not err ; some speaking in the 
language of entrancement, which can only be 
understood and felt by the initiated ; but in 
all these world-voices there is none without 
signification. What the text points toward, 
then, is sympathy and breadth of thought, 
V and what it rebukes is one-sidedness. To the 
truly catholic understanding there is nothing 
in the world without its meaning ; and if a 



ON CATHOLICITY. 23 

voice means nothing to us we may be sure 
there are others who do not so regard it ; for 
" there are many voices, but none without sig- 
nification." 

There are three directions in which this re- 
buke of one-sidedness may be applied. First f 
of all, we may apply it to church methods, 
church organizations, and church ideals. That 
alone might afford us ample field for illustra- 
tion of the whole subject ; but let us take a 
single instance of this lesson of comprehension 
in church ideals. There are two ideals of the 
Church which have always* existed, always 
more or less in conflict, and always failing to 
recognize and understand each other. There 
is, first of all, the ideal of the Church as a 
school of personal and spiritual culture, and 
consequently of the Christian life as a life of 
devout contemplation. In all ages men have 
cried for shelter to grow ripe and leisure to 
grow wise. They have found that the rude 
hubbub of the world is hostile to the develop- 
ment of the more delicate graces of the Spirit, 
and have sought the dewy shades of contem- 
plation, where in silence and repose the spirit- 
ual nature might put forth its bloom and grow 
into the beauty of perfection. To the tired 
hearts of men the Church has afforded this asy- 
lum and retreat. It has rebuked the restless- 



24 ON CATHOLICITY. 

ness of man and called him aside from the 
race for wealth or honor to the stillness of a 
cloistral life, broken only by the quiet bells 
that ring to prayer. And it is not surprising 
that the world has always felt the charm of 
that appeal, and that men, worn out with the 
frantic struggles of life, have sought the calm 
of mountain monasteries, where the king lays 
down his crown, the statesman his perplexities, 
and the scholar his vexations. The truth 
which is expressed in such a state of things is 
a great truth, and one which we cannot afford 
to forget. It is that man needs silence and 
' repose for the nobler qualities of his soul 
to be developed, and it would be as foolish for 
us to expect the rose to become fresh and fra- 
grant without dew as for the gracious peace of 
the true saint to be won without the ministry 
of prayer and pious contemplation. 

Over against this ideal of the Church is set 
another, which has been equally powerful in 
all ages, but exceptionally so in our own — the 
ideal of the Church as a social corporation, a 
school of disciplined activity, or, to use a fa- 
miliar phrase, the " Church militant. " The 
kingdom of God, in the nature of things, can- 
not be quiescent ; its essential ideals are gov- 
ernment, service, and conquest. Kingdoms 
invoke the soldier spirit, and throughout Chris- 



ON CATHOLICITY. 25 

tianity from the first there has run a soldierly 
fiber of courage, of defiance, of organization, 
and of purpose. But to the one-sided man 
those two ideals seemed to be irreconcilably 
opposed. What, says he, has Thomas a Kempis 
in common with Oliver Cromwell ? What bond 
of union is there between St. Bernard, looking 
down on the world from his mountain eyrie of 
silence, and Luther, battling in it with many a 
clanging blow, with words which were half bat- 
tles? Or, if we come to our own day, what 
reconciliation can be found between the quiet 
worshiper who seeks the sanctuary for its 
peace and the busy, eager, irrepressible Chris- 
tian worker, to whom the sanctuary is simply 
the focus of intense activity, where zeal is stim- 
ulated and where strenuous labor finds at once 
its center and encouragement? To the one- 
sided man there is no reconciliation between 
these ideals. The busy Christian sees in the 
cloistral Christian simply an idler, whose relig- 
ion is sublimated selfishness, and the cloistral 
Christian sees only in the other a type of fussy 
zeal and mischievous distraction. The one 
prays little and works much, the other works lit- 
tle and prays much. Each hears his own bell ring 
for his own particular worship, and neither 
recognizes the significance which is in the bell 
that calls the other. The one does not recog- 



26 ON CATHOLICITY. 

nize the qualities of the other, only his defects, 
and so finally each becomes one-sided, deficient 
in breadth and catholicity, the victim of his 
own egotistic view of things, and incapable 
at last of understanding any other type of re- 
ligion but that which he himself represents, 
but does not adorn. 

But in the true church organization both 
these ideals are needed, and all that lies be- 
tween the two extremes ; and no lesson is 
taught more clearly than this by Jesus Christ 
in the selection of his disciples and apostles. 
He chose not one type of man, but many 
types, and so different that, humanly speaking, 
there could be no harmony between them. 
For what contrast could be greater than the 
contrast between John with his mysticism and 
Thomas with his doubts, Peter with his rude 
eloquence and blunt realism and Paul with his 
subtle insight and delicately balanced mind ? 
And, surely, the lesson is clear enough that in 
dealing with a world full of people you may 
have but one message ; but you need different 
men who can translate it into their own dia- 
lect, and be free to deliver it after their own 
individual method. Peter is not the man for 
Mars' Hill, nor Thomas for the day of Pente- 
cost, and the geographical distance that lies 
between Mars' Hill and Jerusalem is simply 



ON CATHOLICITY, 2J 

typical of the immense intellectual differences 
between a Peter and a Paul. Each voice has 
its own significance, and if Peter cannot 
always catch the significance of Paul's — and 
he tells us he cannot ; he confesses that his 
brother Paul has written many things which 
are hard to understand — yet Paul can always 
understand the significance of Peter's. And 
that is one of the lessons we must needs learn, 
and one we find it most difficult to learn. Let 
there be the unity of the faith and the bond of 
peace, but there will also be the difference of 
administration. We shall win men not by out- 
raging, but by consulting, their idiosyncrasies. 
We must work along the plane of the least re- 
sistance. We must overcome the evil by co- 
operating with the good in them. We must 
be all things to all men, if we may save some ; 
and, therefore, we want liturgies, and we do 
not want them ; we want organs, and we can do 
without them ; w r e want street evangelists 
and scholarly bishops; we want High Church, 
Low Church, Broad Church, No Church, and 
we must learn to say with Paul, " We rejoice 
in all, if Christ be preached ; even though he 
be preached of contention. " The street evan- 
gelist may please me, and the scholarly bishop 
may alienate you ; but it does not follow that 
what helps me will help every body, and that 



28 ON CATHOLICITY. 

what disgusts you will be distasteful to every 
one. What we have to recollect is that Chris- 
tianity is not for a man, but for men ; not for a 
race, but for races ; not for a nation, but for 
the world ; and that which may be a confused 
and grating voice to us may ring out full and 
clear to others with the authentic message of 
the gospel of peace. 

Still more forcible is the rebuke of one-sided 
<V Christian teaching which may be found in this 
passage. Over the teaching of Christianity 
infinite disputes have arisen; and what is the 
nature and history of such disputes? Now, 
we often say that life follows from teaching, 
but an equally axiomatic truth is that in the 
first instance teaching has invariably sprung 
from life. Somewhere in the heart of some 
one man or body of men a new illumination 
has sprung up, and there has flashed upon the 
consciences of men a sense of the profound sig- 
nificance of certain truths. That which a 
man believes profoundly he cannot help im- 
pressing on others, and there is no power like 
"the power of intense conviction. He may 
have grasped but a fragment of the truth, but 
it is truth, and often to him it is all the truth. 
Gradually around this fragment of clearly 
realized and deeply felt truth a new school of 
thought or a new Church clusters. And so 



ON CATHOLICITY. 29 

long as this particular truth is profoundly felt 
it cannot help being a force in the world. But 
gradually the early glow dies away ; the body 
of truth ceases to be warm with life because 
the spirit has passed out of it, and instead of 
the leaven that bred life there is left the dry 
kernel out of which life has departed. It is 
at that point the theologian is supreme, for in 
^the decay of faith theology always supplants 
\ religion. The Church goes on echoing old 
forms of dogma which were once full of vitality, 
and becomes creed-bound, stereotyped, lethar- 
gic, formal. To have a sound faith is held to 
be higher than to be a good man, and the right 
creed takes the place of the right life. In a 
word, the movement out of which a great na- 
tional regeneration sprang has spent its force, 
and all that is left is a Church that clings tena- 
ciously to its dogmas, and all the more so be- 
cause it is all that there is left to cling to. 
That is one chapter in the history of the 
Church, and alas ! too common a one. 

Arid then there is another chapter, which, 
with more or less delay, and such differences 
as are incident on environment, is sure to 
follow. 

" The old order changes, yielding place to new, 

And God fulfills himself in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 



30 ON CATHOLICITY. 

That which was once good, forceful, vital, is 
now corrupt, and then new men rise up, who 
use a new language. Against their life 
there is no reproach, but men miss in their 
teaching the ring of old familiar phrases. 
They cast from them old forms of speech, and 
utter their message in fresh and living lan- 
guage, and then because it is fresh and not 
stereotyped, because it is living and not for- 
mal, because the ancient platitudes have given 
place to new fire of thought and theme — then 
theological hue and cry begins, for it is always 
safer to be platitudinarian than latitudinarian. 
Instead of counting it one of God's infinite 
mercies that men do rise up who cannot be 
content with decaying forms, but who in their 
thirst for truth go down to the bottom wells 
again and draw the water straight from the 
rock, men turn upon them and rend them be- 
cause they will not use the common pump and 
fill their cup at a choked and feeble fountain. 
Instead of recognizing the profound philosophy 
of the truth that even a good custom may cor- 
rupt the w r orld when it becomes stagnant, they 
refuse to believe in a God of variety, who ful- 
fills himself in many ways, and cling to the 
idea of a God of uniformity, who fulfills him- 
self only in one way. And then comes one- 
sidedness, and from its issue rancor and bitter- 



ON CATHOLICITY. 3 1 

ness and division — an evil birth — and the spirit 
of religion is lost in contentions about religion, 
and there is wasted over the forms of faith the 
strength that should go for the cleansing of 
the heart and the conversion of the world. 
And it was precisely this spirit which is so 
grandly rebuked by Dr. Johnson in words 
which surely have a very obvious application 
to-day : " Let us not be found when our Mas- 
ter calls us stripping the lace off our waist- 
coats, but the spirit of contention from our 
souls and tongues. Alas ! sir, the man who 
cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not 
find his way thither any sooner in a gray one. ,, 
In other words, it is not the cut of theological 
dress that takes a man to heaven, but the 
heart and life. And the one test of disciple- 
ship which Christ gives is this : " He that hath 
my commandments and keepeth them — he it 
is that loveth me." 

I do not, however, say that new teachers 
may not be themselves intolerant, for there 
is an intolerance of heterodoxy quite as 
vile as that of orthodoxy, and a frequent nar- 
rowness in so-called latitudinarianism not less 
offensive than the utmost narrowness of a 
worn-out dogmatism. In the effort to be ] 
broad it is possible to become narrow, and 
men may be (intolerant apostles of toleration, 



32 ON CATHOLICITY. 

unmitered popes condemning papacy, dissen- 
tient dogmatists denouncing dogma, narrowing 
the whole realm of faith down to the convic- 
tions of an individual. But of that I am not 
the judge, nor will I judge any man ; all I say 
is that the need for these new leaders — these 
new teachers with new ways of expressing their 
thoughts — springs out of the complexity and 
variety of nature itself. 

And of this let us take an illustration. The 
force underlying every thing is life, but how in- 
finite are the various forms which life assumes ! 
You have the vegetable kingdom and the ani- 
mal kingdom, but you have vegetables with 
the characteristics of animals, and animals with 
the characteristics of vegetables. You have 
flowers that are carnivorous, and carnivorous 
insects shaped and colored like flowers, which 
are, so to speak, winged blossoms fluttering on 
the border-line of two kingdoms, and are citi- 
zens of each. You have in the daisy a subtle 
power of life you cannot measure, and the 
same mysterious pulse beats and is fed, from 
the same mysterious source, in bird and beast 
and man. Life every-where. Life that shapes 
itself into deformity and beauty — life that 
clothes itself with obscurity and splendor — life 
that has its insignificant and appalling mani- 
festation — a million forms, all delicately con- 



ON CATHOLICITY. 33 

ceived and expressed, but the same thing in 
all — the mystery of which no man can fathom, 
the origin of which no man can find, the mira- 
cle of which no -man can exhaust — the mys- 
tery of life. And so in all these infinite varie- 
ties of human thought there is one thing 
underlying all, and that is Truth. There is no 
heresy without its touch of truth ; no error 
that has ever governed men that has not 
somewhere at its root, like a mysterious pulse 
of life, a concealed fragment of truth. Truth 
also manifests itself in a thousand ways ; in 
rough and definite forms ; in elusive and indis- 
tinct creations, like the blossoms that are 
winged and the wings that are blossoms. 
Truth breathes in the fancy of the poet, the 
arguments of the philosopher, the prayers of 
the monk, the researches of the scholar, the 
preaching of heterodox and othodox alike. 
And if we could see life as a whole, if we 
could conceive of the life of any single city as a 
whole, with its multifarious minds and hopes 
and wants, we should see that all thtse are 
needed and are the divine complements of 
each other. All are needed. If the strange 
voice has no message for me it may have for 
another, and if the old orthodoxy repel me it 
may be the very life of life to others, whose 
spirit is purer and whose hands are quicker 



34 ON CATHOLICITY. 

unto good than mine. As for me, I hear the 
voices and I hear something of God in all. I 
can sit in the cloistral calm with Thomas a 
Kempis ; I can walk in the blackness of dark- 
ness with John Bunyan ; I can share the vast 
enthusiasms of John Wesley. I can rejoice in 
the sympathetic breadth of Charles Kingsley, 
the masculine reason of Maurice, the tender- 
ness of George Macdonald, the insight and 
charm of Martineau. I can worship with the 
Catholic or the Salvationist ; I can hear the clear 
chime of truth sound through the Unitarian- 
ism of Channing ; and if sometimes the voice 
fades upon my ear I may at least believe that 
it speaks to some one else, for " there are 
many voices, and none of them is without 
signification/ ' That is what we need to recol- 
lect, that all these men are really necessary to 
each other; that one presents a view of truth 
the other omitted ; that the truth has many 
sides, and it needs many men and many minds 
to express it. We need to recollect that the 
forms of truth are as complex as the varieties 
of man himself, but in all and through all the 
eternal God is uttering himself. And the 
whole truth is not contained in your creed nor 
mine any more than the whole sun is mine 
because he shines into my window. That sun- 
light floods other worlds than mine — it is too 



ON CATHOLICITY. 35 

vast a thing for me to claim and bind. It 
shines on men I do not know, it gladdens myr- 
iads I have not seen ; but its source is one, 
and it is shed abroad by him of whom it 
is said, " He is the light of every man who 
cometh into the world." 

And then there is also the implied reproach 
of these words against a one-sided life. The 
narrow and ill-balanced ideal of the Church, 
the petty and partial view of truth, must needs 
breed the narrow and one-sided life. For just 
as men get one-sided views of doctrines so 
they get one-sided views of life, and the gen- 
eral mistake is in the direction of repression — 
the mutilation of life, and not its development. 
1 Men cut themselves off from this custom ancft 
that amusement; they narrow life down to 
j a few barren axioms and pursuits, until 
s their mental life becomes a sort of one-roomed 
life, with no space, no air, no outlook. Such 
men's lives remind me of nothing so much as 
that celebrated symphony of Hadyn's, in 
which one by one the instruments cease and 
the players go out silently, until at last there 
is but one left upon an empty stage and in a 
gathering darkness. For it is the spectacle of 
the many-stringed music of life gradually ceas- 
ing that we see in such a life. Religion is 
narrowed to a dogma and life to a habit. A 



36 ON CATHOLICITY. 

virtue, some solitary isolated virtue, like the 
dwarfed fruit of an unhealthy tree, is made to 
do duty for religion. A bundle of formal 
habits, unconnected by any vital principle, is 
thrust forward as a substitute for a character. 
A moral and intellectual pigmy takes the place 
of that magnificent Pauline conception of a 
manhood which has risen to the fullness of the 
stature of Christ and masquerades as a sample 
Christian. Is it wonderful that Christianity is 
so badly misunderstood by the world, when its 
own professors so little understand it ? 

What, then, is the Christian theory of life ? 
It is sanctification, not withdrawal, the redemp- 
tion of the common lot by the infusion of a 
higher spirit. There is nothing in the whole 
round of life, always excepting that which is 
distinctly sinful in itself, which must be judged, 
common or unclean by the true Christian. It 
is the spirit of use which determines what the 
world is to us. We may condemn art, or mu- 
sic, or sport, if we will, and withdraw from 
them ; but the only result will be that they 
will go on without us, but along a different and 
a lower plane. The artist will then no longer 
paint Madonnas, and the musician will com- 
pose oratorios no more; and let the history of 
the past and the observation of to-day inform 
us what will take their place. We may sweep 



ON CATHOLICITY. 37 

into one intolerant prohibition things which 
are innocent in themselves, and which give no 
evidence of perversion ; things which were 
once innocent and are now partially perverted ^ 
things which are the expression of natural hu- 
man tastes, but which are frequently abused ; 
things which are the expression of depraved 
tastes, and admit of no apology ; but do we 
really gain any thing by this undiscriminating 
censure? Do we produce at the very best a 
high type of either manhood or society? Is not 
the manhood a thing of shreds and patches 
and the society an artificial fabric of shallow 
virtue, the product of coercion, but all the 
while secretly resenting the coercion and pre- 
paring for revolt? The testimony of history 
is again quite clear and unmistakable. The 
fire which kindles Savonarola's Bonfire of the 
Vanities is the fire which will presently light 
his own stake, and the kingdom of the saints is 
violently swept away by the immense recoiling 
wave of the Restoration. Reforms from the 
outside always fail ; the only reform that can 
last is from the inside; it is as leaven, which be- 
gins in the center and leavens the whole lump. 
And quite apart from this, it is a question 
which demands reply, " Is the world to be 
treated as an evil vision by the Christian ? " 
Is this many-citied globe, this vast collection 



38 ON CATHOLICITY. 

of hands which labor for each other, and of 
brains that toil to help all comers, this 
world wherein splendor and delight are found, 
music interpreting the inarticulate passions of 
the soul, and art building up visions of imper- 
ishable beauty — is it a thing to be treated as 
wholly evil? Should we climb our pillar like 
Stylites, and there rot in what we dare to mis- 
call sainthood, esteeming the world at our feet 
a leper's ward, and all its various life of un- 
named charities and natural humanities as a 
sin-infected thing? Who is the leper — Sty- 
lites or the world ? Alas ! for poor Stylites 
and men like him. He was only the devil's 
saint after all. He was what he called him- 
self, though, as is the fashion of such men, he 
never meant to be believed, 

"From scalp to sole, one slough and crust of sin, 
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven." 

There are men like him still, who stand upon 
the pillar of their solitary dogmatism — the 
dogmatism of a crotchet — and condemn all 
who do not agree with them. But the crowd 
is right and they are wrong. They are not 
saints, they are pseudo-saints, they are relig- 
ious abortions. Sainthood is righteousness 
and soberness and a sound mind. Sainthood 
has its root in the common earth, and from 
that draws the vital sap which feeds the bios- 



ON CATHOLICITY. 39 

soms of eternity. Sainthood is the saving of 
others, not the saving of self. Sainthood 
opens a warm bosom to all the unhappy of 
that toiling crowd ; it is comradeship ; but it 
is comradeship penetrated with a divine pity 
which confesses — 

" Then with a rush the intolerable craving 
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet-call — 

O, to save these ! to perish for their saving, 
Die for their life, be offered for them all." 

I will be tempted to no Stylites-pillar ; I will 
not see how narrow I can make my life, but 
how broad ; I will not try how miserable I can 
make myself, and then blasphemously call my 
peevishness piety, but how happy I can be, 
and how happy I can make others, and so I 
will use the world as not abusing it. Let 
those who will climb the dismal pillar of 
their crotchets and starve every instinct of art 
and joy and beauty which God has given 
them, every wholesome human craving and 
delight. As for me, I hear the voice of singers 
at a feast, and I am going down to Cana of 
Galilee to meet Him who dined with publicans 
and sinners. 

Do you remember the exquisite lines which 
Wordsworth wrote about his wife ? 

" She was a phantom of delight 
When first she gleamed upon my sight ; 



40 ON CATHOLICITY. 

A lovely apparition, sent 

To be a moment's ornament. 

I saw her, upon nearer view, 

A spirit, yet a woman, too ; 

A creature not too bright nor good 

For human nature's daily food." 

What ! is it possible to be too bright or gpod? 
Yes, it is ; a great deal too bright and good for 
human nature's daily food. The world has no 
taste, and still less use, for fastidious and im- 
palpable sainthood. And when men have so 
withdrawn from the world as to cease to be of 
use to it they often say they have gained " the 
higher life," and if that be the " higher life " I 
prefer the lower. The fact is, they have lost 
their life, because they hav,e lost their relation 
to humanity. For we may safely conclude 
that he who has ceased to serve humanity has 
ceased to serve Christ, and that which is " unfit 
for human nature's daily food " is fit only to 
be cast out upon the dunghill and trodden 
under foot of men. 

But for the healthy man — and health is the 
true equivalent of religion — there will be an 
infinite interest in life and in all that concerns 
life. He will want to see it all, to know it all, 
to understand it all. A modern writer has 
spoken of that " magnificent rage of living" 
which throbs in the heart of one-and-twenty ; 
and that rage of living, that keen sense of the 



ON CATHOLICITY. 4 1 

delight and glory of life which fills the heart of 
youth is a natural thing. Not to delight in 
life is to pour scorn upon God and his 
works and his ordering of things. To turn 
your back upon the finished art of God's 
hands, the heavens and the earth which he has 
formed, is simply to insult their Maker. To 
take the narrowest possible interest in life is to 
disdain and reject the great education which 
God has provided for you, and, so far from 
showing a superior piety, it only reflects an un- 
gladdened heart. Once more the voice of 
Paul reaches us, and there is the ring of true 
manhood in its tone : " All things are yours ; " 
there is only one thing which is not yours — 
you " are not your own." All things are 
yours — art and science, nature and books, 
laughter and sunlight ; only you are " not your 
own," for the one condition upon which God 
gives us so much is that we give ourselves 
away. 

44 He only lives in the world's life 
Who hath renounced his own." 

Here, then, is full life, broad life, happy life, 
life as God would have you live it. Endeavor 
to estimate the full breadth of life, and to 
find God in it all. Recognize the significance 
of those voices which reach you daily through 
the penetrating tranquillity of nature, the wis- 



42 ON CATHOLICITY. 

dom of books, the suggestions of art, the stormy 
world-clangors which assail you out of the great 
Armageddon, where men struggle ceaselessly 
in political and social causes, and where some 
strenuous soul is hourly fighting his last battle. 
World-voices, wind-voices, star-voices ; voices 
reaching us from the dramas of human life and 
struggle, from the far heights of prayer, from 
the near valleys of the shadow of death ; 
voices of wisdom, laughter, hope, sorrowful 
confession, lamenting folly, obscure heroism ; 
these — and how many others? — reach us mo- 
ment by moment, and there is something of 
God in all. Seek him, and you shall find. Be 
a lover of God, and God will be every-where 
for you. And so the world will be transfig- 
ured, and you will say — 

" The world's no blot to me, nor blank : 

It means intensely and means good ; 

To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 



Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. 
Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign. 
And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord. 
He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut 
down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that 
Moses had made : for to those days the children of Israel 
did burn incense to it : and he called it Nehushtan, that is, a 
piece of brass. — 2 Kings xviii, 1-4. 

I am convinced that the Lord hath yet more truth for us yet 
to break forth out of his holy word. — John Robinson (1620), 
Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers. 



NEHUSHTAN. 45 



III. 

NEHUSHTAN, 

A STUDY IN PROGRESS BY ICONOCLASM. 

THERE is a short verse in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews which looks so like a truism that we 
are apt to overlook its real significance. " Now 
that," says the writer, " which decayeth and 
waxeth old is ready to vanish away." It van- 
ishes away. It crumbles into unnoticed ruin ; 
it silently withdraws itself like one of those 
strange ocean islands which to-day are green 
with life, and in a year's time are submerged 
and forgotten. We are familiar with this noise- 
less exodus of customs, habits of thought, and 
methods of life ; when we ask for them we are 
told they are not — they have withdrawn. But 
there is another process by which things which 
are old' and decayed have to be got rid of. 
You may have age without senility, and decay 
without apparent lack of force. The thing 
that ought to vanish away may stubbornly re- 
fuse to do any thing of the kind. It is a mis- 
take to suppose that stupidity is a passive 
thing — it often possesses a deadly activity, a 



46 NEHUSHTAN. 

most pugnacious energy. So far from vanish- 
ing away, evil custom may deliberately block 
every road of progress, and thus decay — of 
truth, of knowledge, of religious forms — may 
be an inert corrupting mass incapable of mov- 
ing itself, lying right athwart the march of hu- 
manity, and breeding pollution and death on 
every side. What must be done then? Then 
another force comes into play, Iconoclasm. 
What will not withdraw must be expelled ; 
what does not peaceably dissolve before 
the presence of a new age must be broken 
by it. 

Now, from this point of view, this story of 
Hezekiah's breaking the brazen serpent of 
Moses is one of the most striking and instruct- 
ive passages in the whole Bible. It is the 
story of what men would call an act of sac- 
rilege or heroic common-sense, precisely as 
they are disposed to view it. Hezekiah, in 
this early section of his life, was one of those 
in whom the noble Hebrew hatred of idolatry 
burned clear and strong. He came to the 
throne in the very flower of his manhood, and 
he had given to him that happiest of all fates, 
power to carry out without hinderance the no- 
blest purposes of his heart. It was not his lot 
to eat out his heart in silence or prophesy to 
deaf ears and mocking mouths, as many a 



NEHUSHTAN. 47 

prophet had done before him. He had nour- 
ished his youth in the fear of God, and now his 
hour had come. 

It is easy to picture to ourselves how this 
manly nature had turned away indignant from 
the polluted Baal-worship of his time, and had 
often longed to strike a blow against that 
which was the disgrace, the dishonor, and the 
open sore of his nation. It is easy, also, to 
imagine the temptations to expediency which 
would beset one so young, when suddenly 
there was thrust into his hand the power by 
which his ideals might be realized. We have 
all known men who were full of noble purpose 
when they were impotent, and of ignoble hesi- 
tation when they were powerful ; politicians 
who promised much before the people heeded 
them, and did nothing when the people trusted 
them ; governments whose members could pro- 
pose heroic remedies in the days of obscurity, 
but who have been false to every pledge and 
promise of the past in the hour of victory. 
There is nothing easier than to be brave when 
it is impossible to reduce our words to action, 
and to forget our vows when the hour for their 
fulfillment is at hand. Hezekiah was not one 
of these. He was no truckler, no time-server, 
no braggart, prodigal in promise and niggardly 
in action. He ascended the throne with a 



48 NEHUSHTAxN. 

resolute determination to do right at all costs, 
and do right all round. He drew no fin'e dis- 
tinction between the Baal-worshiper's sacri- 
fice to an idol and the Israelitish reverence for 
the brazen serpent of Moses. There was a 
Cromwellian directness, honesty, and common- 
sense about him. He saw that Baal's statue 
in the grove and the brazen serpent in the 
temple meant much the same thing, and were 
the causes of the same evils to the people. 
Each was worshiped, and each was therefore 
evil. If one was to be destroyed, the other 
must perish with it : and therefore " he brake 
in pieces the brazen serpent of Moses, and said 
it is Nehushtan, that is, a piece of brass.'* And 
it was one of the most daring feats of iconp- 
clasm which the history of the world records. 

Now let us consider what the brazen serpent 
of Moses was, and we shall understand the 
motives for Hezekiah's conduct. 

First of all, we have to remember that it had 
been the channel of a divine grace. Seven 
hundred years before there had happened a 
memorable thing in Jewish history. God was 
making a nation, and the forty years of miser- 
able wandering in the desert was the first stage 
in its making. The first great lesson which the 
people had to learn was a profound faith in 
Gad, and the wandering in the desert was the 



NEHUSHTAN. 49 

school in which that faith was learned. The 
lesson was difficult and bitter, and we can 
hardly be surprised that many times the ex- 
periment broke down. Think of what it 
meant for a people who had grown soft and 
sensuous with slavery to be forced out into a 
life of uncertainty and peril ; to drift up and 
down the immeasurable wilderness seemingly 
without plan or purpose or issue ; to have no 
home, no resting-place ; for the dead to be 
buried where they fell, and the little children 
to grow up how they could amid the hazards of 
a nomad's life ; and for this to last not for a year 
or a decade, but a life-time, and for years to 
pass, and the leaders to die one by one with- 
out the vision of that promised land, which 
seemed so immediate and real when they left 
the brickfields of Egypt. Picture to yourself 
that footsore, weary multitude, withered age 
and dawning youth, suffering perpetual evic- 
tion and exile, and can you wonder that the 
bitter cry rose, at last, " Wherefore have ye 
brought us up to die in the wilderness? for 
there is no bread, neither is there any water, 
and our soul loatheth this light bread ! " It 
was a sensual complaint, and God answered it 
by sending fiery serpents among them, as if 
to teach them that there were worse things 
than lack of meat. And then it was that the 
4 



50 NEHUS-HTA-N. 

brazen serpent was made, and whoso looked on 
it in faith was healed. Out of the thing which 
had stung them came healing, as if God would 
teach them by this strange symbolism that his 
chastisement was a blessing in disguise. The 
piece of twisted brass, hastily shaped into the 
fashion of a serpent, became the channel of 
a divine grace. We can readily understand 
why that curious symbol was sacredly pre- 
served and carried with them through all their 
tumultuous fortunes. We can partly under- 
stand, also, how it came to be looked upon as 
a charm, till at last incense was burned before 
it, and to it, ugly piece of twisted, tarnished 
brass as it was, worship was offered. And 
then it was time to break it. A channel of 
grace which serves one generation may become 
a source of infection and disaster to the next, 
and God is not limited to this or that method 
of healing men, for he is a God not of uniform- 
ity, but of variety. When men worship the 
mere channel of a heavenly grace, and lift no 
eyes of faith and reverence beyond the brazen 
serpent to the eternal God who shines upon 
them from the heavens, then it is time for some 
Hezekiah to come and to break the symbol, 
and to cry, " It is Nehushtan, that is, a bit of 
brass!" 

But this brazen serpent was also a relic and 



NEHUSHTAN. 5 1 

a memory. We know well how natural it is 
for men to reverence relics of the past, espe- 
cially when those relics represent great national 
events. We smile at the Catholic devotee's 
veneration for the bones of saints, the sup- 
posed wood of the cross, the traditional frag- 
ments of the raiment of the Saviour; but, 
supposing we could be quite sure that those 
things were real and authentic, who would not 
look upon them with reverence ? We crowd 
to exhibitions where we may see the prayer- 
book of Queen Mary, or the blood-stained 
tippet which Anne Boleyn wore upon the 
scaffold, or the pocket Bible which Oliver 
Cromwell carried with him into the battle of 
Marston Moor, or the scanty records of early 
Methodist heroism ; is it a true or false in- 
stinct which holds us silent when we look on 
these things, and which thrills us with a strange 
awe as we stand within the precincts of the 
Tower, or tread the time-worn floors of Holy- 
rood? It is a right instinct, for reverence 
for the past is one of the secrets of national 
greatness. The most shallow-minded tourist 
who stands within the room where Shakespeare 
was born or George Washington died can 
scarcely help feeling some thrill of keen emo- 
tion in the recollection of all that those names 
recall, and all that has been witnessed by 



52 NEHUSHTAN. 

those narrow walls in the unrecorded past. For 
something imperishable has been there and 
has left its glory. There arose a fountain 
which has overflowed the world, a force which 
has outlived the havoc of mortality. One 
almoht hears the solemn clock of eternity beat- 
ing in such a scene, and realizes that all our 
noisy years are but moments in the being of 
the Everlasting Silence. And if we can feel 
thus for secular names, how much more for 
names of symbols which are associated with a 
divine glory ? Who would not feel constrained 
to bow his head in profound emotion, if not 
in adoration, if he could be sure that he was 
looking on the very wood to which the 
Saviour's hand was nailed in the agony of Cal- 
vary, or the napkin in which they wrapped his 
head when they anointed him with frankin- 
cense and laid him in his tomb ? And it was 
thus that generations of Israelites had learned 
to regard the brazen serpent. It was the sym- 
bol of a great deliverance, it was the key that 
unlocked the door of a nation's memories. It 
was natural and it was right to reverence it. 
But when it took the place of God, when the 
sacred relic is a fetich which obscures the 
Saviour, when men manifest a passionate re- 
gard for the mere sentimentalities and symbol- 
isms of Christianity, and live their whole life 



NEHUSHTAN. 53 

in habitual defiance of the spirit and temper 
of Christ, then God raises up some Hezekiah 
who does his work with a ruthless iconoclasm, 
and, dashing the precious relic or sacred sym- 
bol to the ground, cries, " Behold it is nothing 
but Nehushtan — a piece of brass." 

There are natures to which symbolism in 
worship is necessary, and there are natures to 
which all symbolism is abhorrent. But even 
where it is abhorrent it may still be necessary, 
and, perhaps, the more necessary because it is 
abhorrent. The hard, practical, unimaginative 
nature usually resents symbolism. Are you 
building a church ? Such a man will make it 
as much like a barn as he can, and it is merely 
wasting words to tell him that the spire may 
be a finger pointing to the sky, and the 
painted window, with its crowned and saintly 
figures, a spectacle which may liberate and en- 
rich the imagination ; and the " height, the 
space, the gloom, the glory" of the great ca- 
thedral roof a fit pathway by which the 
thoughts of men may travel Godward. Are 
you arranging your order of service? Such a 
man will make it as bald as possible, as much 
like an auctioneer's performance as he can, and 
the very idea that music may be the servant 
of devotion and that the sweet voice of the 
chorister may teach us more of truth and God 



54 NEHUSHTAN. 

than all the bitter eloquence of the heated 
pulpiteer is to him mere monstrous and repul- 
sive nonsense. No ; to such a man baldness, 
plainness, ugliness become the very essentials 
of spiritual worship. Every thing about the 
man reflects the starved instincts of a narrow 
soul, and he sets up those instincts as a univer- 
sal standard. He is incapable of understand- 
ing what the beauty of the Lord our God is, 
or of uttering the prayer that beauty as well 
as strength may dwell in the sanctuary. Every 
farthing spent beyond the exact needs of 
brick and mortar in building God's house is to 
him a hideous extravagance, and his perpetual 
Judas-cry is, " Why this waste ? " 

But it is not upon any such plan of Puritan- 
ical parsimony that God has framed this world, 
nor is it for us to give him our worst who has 
always given us his best. And this very same 
practical and unimaginative man, if he did but 
know it, is precisely the man who most needs 
symbolism in worship, for the imaginative 
carry their own symbolism with them. It is 
he who really needs visible types and the en- 
chantment of a visible beauty to warm his 
frigid thoughts and touch his heart with the 
liberating hand of a true emotion. The im- 
mense hold which the Catholic Church has 
always had, and still has, on the minds of the 



NEHUSHTAN. 55 

masses — and let it be remembered that the 
masses are mainly the poor, whose lives are 
necessarily passed for the most part in sordid 
and ugly surroundings — is largely accounted 
for by the fact that Catholicism has always 
known how to awaken and satisfy the appetite 
for beauty. On the other hand, the loss of 
Protestantism through its awful contempt for, 
and neglect of, the instinct of beauty has 
been beyond all computation ; and when I 
hear, as I often hear, of the children of stiff 
Nonconformists turning from the bareness of 
the meeting-house to more ornate services and 
surroundings, I know that the secret of half 
these defections lies in the natural need of the 
average human nature for symbolism in wor- 
ship, or, at least, for such elements in worship 
as shall make God's house the house beautiful 
to the countless toilers on whom no radiance 
of beauty ever falls. 

I say that we Protestants have neglected 
these instincts, and that we still neglect them. 
In the greatest age of art it was the Church 
that was adorned with great pictures, repre- 
senting martyr constancy and holy mysteries of 
love and passion ; it was for the Church that 
the great music was composed ; and the Church 
itself, in its soaring glory of golden cupola or 
carven spire, was a thing so splendid that it 



$6 NEHUSHTAN. 

seemed to stand apart from common life, and 
to overtower it, as the proper incarnation of 
divine things and thoughts. To be permitted 
to paint a picture worthy of the house of God, 
or to produce a solemn music fitted for its 
praise or lamentations, was then the most pas- 
sionate dream of artist and musician. How is 
it that in small European cities, which at no 
time were overprosperous, we find baptistries 
and churches and cathedrals of such exquisite 
grace or massive splendor that men travel from 
the ends of the earth to see them and look 
upon them, wondering all the while how it 
came to pass that such creations were begotten 
in such places ? The reply is plain : these pre- 
cious gems of architecture exist because men 
once had a species of reverence for the house 
of God which has long since passed away. In 
those days the church was the sacred deposi- 
tory of all things rare and beautiful. Then a 
Raphael thought it no disgrace to paint for 
the banner of a common church procession a 
Madonna and child so lovely that to-day thou- 
sands visit the galleries of Dresden for the one 
purpose of beholding it. How do we now 
treat our sacred pictures, when, as happens 
rarely, one worthy of that word is actually 
produced? We make money of it by showing 
it at a shilling a head, and what there is of 



NEHUSHTAX. 57 

sacredness in it is killed by the surroundings 
we provide for it. We have wholly lost the art 
of cathedral-building ; we have neither the pa- 
tience nor the inspiration for the work ; we 
build by contract, and our work does not 
endure. 

We say we have a more spiritual rever- 
ence than the Middle Ages had ; but our rev- 
erence does not go far enough to teach us 
how to build the house of God with honesty 
and thoroughness. We say that God dwelleth 
not in temples made with hands ; no, clearly 
not in such temples as ours, w T here the very 
walls are stucco lies and the adornments glar- 
ing gilt impostures. We say that the true 
worshiper can dispense with such aids as art 
and beauty may afford, and this is true ; but 
how few are these true worshipers, and how 
many those in whom devotion is a temper dif- 
ficult of growth, and, therefore, needing every 
sort of element which can strengthen or develop 
it ? We may ignore these desires for beauty if 
we please, but as long as human nature exists 
men will prefer beauty to deformity, and sim- 
ply because the majority of men are dull in 
imagination the majority are always too thank- 
ful for any symbolism which enables them the 
better to understand the deep things of the 
Spirit. It would be at once the falsest and the 



58 NEHUSHTAN. 

shallowest possible interpretation of this pas- 
sage if we assumed that because symbolism is 
abused therefore all symbols should be abol- 
ished. 

But of what this passage does mean, and how 
alone it can be understood, we have many les- 
sons in the past history of the Church. Thus, 
when Jesus said, " This is my body, this is my 
blood," he used a symbol, a beautiful and 
touching symbol. He meant to say that the 
disciple is spiritually nourished with the very 
life of his Lord, and that this life passing into 
him changes his vile body to a heavenly like- 
ness, and makes it one with Christ in immortal 
life. The picture of Jesus standing among his 
sorrowful disciples on the night of his betrayal, 
and lifting that simple cup of wine and calling 
it his blood, is an immortal picture which has 
sunk deep into the heart and imagination of 
the world. It is the poetry of farewell, and for 
the Christian it is the symbol of eternal love 
and life. But when men begin to take the 
words literally, when in process of time the 
wafer is delared the very body of Christ and 
the wine his very blood, when the priest and 
his formal rites obscure the Saviour, then a 
new movement begins in men's hearts, and 
honest men feel about the sacrament of com- 
munion as Hezekiah felt about the brazen 



NEHUSHTAN. 59 

serpent. There is then a revulsion from a 
symbolism which has been abused and misin- 
terpreted, and men go to the other extreme 
of a worship which is stripped bare of all sym- 
bolism. 

We may, and do, perhaps, shrink from 
the violent temper of such reformers, but the 
iconoclast at his very worst is better than the 
idolatrous priest at his very best. Better a 
thousand times to worship in a barn or on the 
bleak hill-side with the Covenanters than to 
bow before an image or a wafer in the most 
glorious temple ever built with hands. Better 
that the cathedral shall be wrecked, and all its 
gathered wealth of art and beauty shattered 
in the dust, than that men shall make it the 
place where the symbol is worshiped and the 
eternal God is forgotten. Man can worship 
God without symbol or temple, as Elijah did 
in the desert, as St. Paul did in the poorest 
homes of Corinth or Thessalonica, where he 
must literally have held cottage-meetings ; but 
man cannot worship God when he offers to a 
piece of brass the sacrifice which is due to God 
alone. The worshiped serpent in the temple is 
the most loathsome and terrible of all defile- 
ments, and there becomes an intolerable insult 
to God. And it was that vision of the wor- 
shiped serpent which William Blake saw and 



60 NEHUSHTAN. 

described in those weird and marvelous verses 
of his : 

" I saw a chapel all of gold, 

Which none did dare to enter in, 

And many weeping stood without, 
Weeping, mourning, worshiping. 

" I saw a serpent rise between 

The white pillars of the door, 
And he forced and forced and forced, 

Till he the golden hinges tore. 

" And along the pavement sweet, 
Set with pearls and rubies bright, 

All his shining length he drew, 
Till upon the altar white 

" He vomited his poison out 

On the bread and on the wine : 
— So I turned into a sty, 

And laid me down among the swine." 

And what Blake means to teach is that even the 
swine-trough of the prodigal is a likelier place 
wherein to worship God than the defiled sanc- 
tuary where the idolatrous serpent lies coiled 
in the holy place, and is the thing which men 
worship. When that happens it is time for 
Hezekiah to come to the throne and do his 
work. Nothing must stand in the way ; neither 
use nor wont, neither memory nor symbolism, 
neither past service nor present custom, neither 
the wrath nor the horror nor the outraged sen- 
sibility of the people : the serpent must be 



NEHUSHTAN. 6l 

broken, and, standing on its shattered frag- 
ments, he shall cry, " Behold, it is Nehushtan, it 
is a piece of brass ! " 

How, then, does this story apply itself to our 
own time ? 

We may apply it in the first place to the 
worship which is often offered to creeds. 
Creeds are good, and he is but a shallow fool 
who thinks it clever to ridicule and despise 
them, as he would have been a shallow fool 
who saw nothing noble in the Israelitish rever- 
ence for the brazen serpent. Creeds represent 
the toil and prayer of the wisest and best of 
men through long centuries. Age after age 
has bent itself over the sacred book, and has 
sought to reduce its infinite wealth of teaching 
to some distinct and definite mold, and if the 
martyr has served his generation so has the 
theologian, for without the theologian the mar- 
tyr had not learned how to die. But when the 
creed becomes every thing and life nothing, 
when men think that a sound faith in certain 
statements of the Church is all that God re- 
quires of them, when they make an intellectual 
assent to articles of faith the binding test of 
the Church, and disfranchise from the charity 
of God and fellowship of man all who dare to 
differ from them, then the creed has become 
an idol, and it is time for it to be broken. 



62 NEHUSHTAN. 

Then some new Hezekiah is sure to rise who 
will trample it under foot and cry, " It is Ne- 
hiishtan ! " And are there not those still among 
us who burn incense to the creed ? Have not 
men a fatal knack of transferring their alle- 
giance from God to the creed ? Was it not a 
fanatical worship of the creed which led Calvin 
to burn Servetus ; and in this what was he bet- 
ter than a Bonner or a Gardiner, who burned 
men and women by scores because they could 
not believe in transubstantiation ? These scenes 
are apt to reproduce themselves in history, in 
spirit if not in form, and then what the age 
wants, and what the occasion is pretty sure to 
develop, is a Hezekiah who will boldly take up 
the piece of twisted brass and will say, " Beauti- 
ful as it is, or sacred or memorable, it is but a 
thing of man's devising after all, and we can 
live without it ; it is Nehushtan — a piece of 
brass ! " 

The same thing may happen in regard to 
even the Bible itself. We may fanatically 
worship it as a book, as a book which is to be 
accepted without question down to its very 
commas and head-lines ; and then God is bound 
to teach us, perhaps by means that may be 
very startling to us, that it is not a book which 
we are to • worship, but him, the living and 
eternal One. It is quite possible for men to 



NEHUSHTAN. 63 

fight eagerly for the inspiration of the Bible 
and yet to know little of God ; to hate heresy 
more than they hate wrong ; to defend inspira- 
tion in such a way that it is clear they know 
nothing of that inspiration of divine charity 
which should breathe through their life. Be 
sure the book in itself will as little save us as 
the creed which is based upon the book. There 
are thousands of persons who read the Bible 
every day in formal family worship, and are 
ready to fight for the Bible, and are angry to 
hear a single verse of it questioned by even 
the most reverent scholarship, who, neverthe- 
less, are mean and covetous and c unchristlike 
in every detail of their daily life, so that the 
Bible is really to them as much a fetich as the 
brazen serpent was to the people of Israel. 

The same truth applies to all forms of wor- 
ship, and applies even more cogently. Some- 
times the liturgy or the sacrament becomes 
the fetich, sometimes the man. And then it 
is that in some great and terrible way God has 
to teach us that neither man nor liturgy shall 
stand between him and the living souls of 
men. He who has preached to others himself 
becomes castaway, and lips that have spoken 
the sacramental absolution are soiled with the 
mire of public shame. History is full of such 
lessons, and they abound, in the records of the 



64 NEHUSHTAN. 

individual life. The very best and noblest 
things may be perverted, and there is no surer 
way of perversion than the substitution of in- 
stitutions for God, faith in things for faith in 
the Eternal. When men get to think that 
there is only one right way of government, or 
only one man who can govern them, then the 
throne is suddenly overturned, or the pillar on 
which a nation rested is snapped. When 
Englishmen paid such an idolatrous reverence 
to the crowm that they said they would " fight 
for it though it hung upon a bush, ' ' then a Crom- 
well arises, who thrusts king and crown aside 
with mailed hand ; and when Puritan England 
thinks that none can govern her but Cromwell, 
then Cromwell dies, and leaves no successor. 
When men rest in purposes and ambitions 
which stop short of God, then God sweeps 
away their wealth in a moment, and teaches 
them that it is after all Nehushtan, a piece of 
brass, by no means needful to a worthy and a 
noble life. From first to last God's interfer- 
ences in history, by which we mean those 
mighty movements which the least serious 
have felt to be the hand of God, and God's 
great men who have been raised up to do his 
will, have taught the same lesson. He can 
govern through kings or without them ; he 
can teach men by symbols or without them.; 



NEHUSHTAN. 65 

the Lord gives and the Lord takes away ; 
but the one voice of thunder, which never 
ceases to reverberate through the lives of men, 
is the voice of the great I AM, uttering the 
primal command, " I am the Lord thy God, 
and thou shalt have no other God before 
Me." 

If these lessons are difficult to learn, let us 
remember that there are none more needful. 
We all have an instinctive dread of falling into 
a stereotyped life, have we not ? We delight 
in freedom, variety, spontaneity. It is the 
very salt of human life that it is individual ; it 
is the secret of its charm that it perpetually 
flows into fresh molds and assumes new 
shapes. History is a great panorama wherein 
customs, ideals, manners are always changing, 
and it is this evolution from barbarism, this 
endless growth and change, which is the secret 
of its spell. Literature takes different forms 
in different ages, and then exhausts them, so 
that each age must write its own books and 
learn to utter its own thoughts in some new 
fashion which is native and natural to it. 
Science knows no sameness ; it puts forth fresh 
flowers in every age, and becomes more mar- 
velous with the fullness of its revelations in 
each succeeding generation. Are, then, the 
forms of truth and religion alone to remain 



66 NEHUSHTAN. 

stereotyped ? Is God alone to be unvaried in 
his methods of teaching men and guiding 
them and revealing himself to them ? Is the 
world of religious thought alone to be unfresh- 
ened with any spirit of change which passes 
over it like a heavenly wind, leaving freshness 
and fertility behind it ? No ; God also refuses 
to be stereotyped. He chooses to address 
each generation with a living voice and to 
clothe his message in fresh and fruitful forms. 
The breaking up of old forms means the inflow- 
ing of new life, and " the thoughts of men are 
widened with the process of the suns." In the 
eighteenth century it is the evangelical re- 
vival, or Methodism, which breaks asunder old 
forms with the expansion of a new life ; in the 
nineteenth century it is the Salvation Army ; 
and when either becomes stereotyped God will 
not fail to invent some other and better thing. 
Let us have faith in God then. What though 
the tumult and clangor of opinion wax loud 
and louder round us ! From the hall of unjust 
judgment and the strife of tongues there is a 
Voice which speaks on, calm and undismayed, 
" For this cause came I into the world, that I 
should bear witness to the truth. Every one 
that is of the truth heareth my voice/' What 
though we stand amid the wreck of systems 
and institutions which vanish away ! God 



NEHUSHTAN. 67 

owns himself the author of the ruin ; he calls 
us to see the desolations which he hath 
wrought in the earth ; he puts his hand upon 
our complaining mouths, and says, " Be still and 
know that I am God ; " and w T hen he removes 
it our lips are cleansed, our heart is quieted, 
and we cry, " God is our refuge and strength ; 
therefore will not we fear though the earth be 
removed, and though the mountains be carried 
into the midst of the sea." 

In our regulation of Christian conduct and 
policy the same lesson needs to be learned. 
Customs not less than forms of truth become 
Nchnshtan, and have to be cast aside. Society 
changes, offering new problems, new vices, new 
difficulties, and then the attitude of Christian- 
ity must change too. The only real heresy, 
the one deadly sin of which Churches are ca- 
pable, is to forget that we serve a living Christ, 
who is hourly instructing us, who orders the 
campaign and disposes the battle. We are 
not bound by the words of Jesus spoken in 
Galilean ears so much as by his spirit and 
temper, and the messages our own hearts re- 
ceive. If it be the mere recorded words of 
Christ that bind us, then we may fairly argue 
that Christ was not upon the side of total ab- 
stinence, nor against slavery, nor for the eman- 
cipation of woman. Where has he even 



68 NEHUSHTAN. 

named such things ? And why has he not done 
so ? Why has he not given us as distinct a 
prohibition of the use of wine as Mohammed? 
Take the mere words of Christ, and make 
them the exact standard of morals, and use 
them in their narrow, legal, inelastic limita- 
tions, and you destroy Christianity. You erect 
an exegetical Nehushtan upon the grave 
of Christ. You re-impose the Mosaic bondage 
of the letter ; and that is not how Christ de- 
signed to interpret himself to us. No ; he has 
bequeathed us a certain temper and spirit, the 
temper of renunciation, the spirit of denying 
ourselves for the good of others, the law of 
service which demands that even liberties 
which are natural and legitimate to us should 
be curtailed if by any means we might save 
some ; and it is that spirit we have to re-inter- 
pret in the light of modern needs. It is said 
that when the fishermen, toiling on the banks 
of Newfoundland, find the masts and rigging 
so encumbered with ice that the ship's uses 
seem half lost, they head for the gulf-stream, 
which is but a few score miles away, and there, 
in a few hours, every trace of winter disap- 
pears, and the ship is herself again, shaking 
out her sails to the wind like a bird that feels 
the touch of summer on her wings. And so it is 
when we pass from a literal to a free and spir- 



NEHUSHTAN. 69 

itual interpretation of Christianity. The ice 
melts in the gulf-stream of a larger life, and 
the Church that seemed a dead thing, incrusted 
with useless traditions, becomes a living force 
for the rescue and the help of men. Let the 
form melt ; let it be ours to know the spirit 
and to recollect that we have simply to live 
our Christianity as we think Christ would, had 
he lived in the nineteenth century, and any 
thing that comes between us and the realiza- 
tion of that divine ideal is a Nehushtan which 
must be trampled under foot. 

And so, again, this living Christ is the only 
warrant of a living Christian ministry. If the 
minister be not, in truth, a prophetic man, 
who hears the heavenly voices and interprets 
them, he is no minister. It will not serve him 
merely to reiterate, however eloquently, the 
outworn thinking of a system which has van- 
ished away. And we may ask, indeed, how 
can he do so — how can he dare, or be content, 
to do so, if he believes that the living God is 
still speaking to the living minds of men, and 
has his distinct messages, which it is the mis- 
sion of the true minister to utter to his peo- 
ple ? For the book of God is not a book — 
something consisting of so many chapters 
and parables and ethical instructions ; but the 
word of God, a series of living inbreathed 



yo NEHUSHTAN. 

messages, uttered afresh to every true and 
humble-hearted teacher. That was a wise 
saying of an old minister to a young one, who 
had complained that after three years' preach- 
ing he had exhausted the interest of the Bible : 
" Young man, sink your shaft deeper, and you 
will come to water." True, I have felt, as I 
suppose every man who endeavors to instruct 
his fellows may feel at times, as though I had 
reached the limit of my teaching, as if I had 
nothing more to say and the utmost bound- 
ary and horizon of my poor knowledge were 
touched. And there has lain the open Bible 
before me, with the old familiar texts, but no 
voice, no music, no light in any one of them. 
So I have sat, sterile, silent, incapable of 
thought ; and then it has been as if a subtle 
music suddenly breathed and trembled through 
the stillness of the room, and a light has shone, 
and Christ has told me something quite new, 
something I never dreamed of in my life be- 
fore, something which I could not have under- 
stood till that moment, because until then I 
had no experience by which to interpret it. 
O think of it ! For century after century men 
have been preaching from these scanty bio- 
graphical remains of Jesus, this tithe of para- 
bles, this little' handful of ethics, aphorisms, 
incidents; and yet the words are newer, 



NEHUSHTAN. 7 1 

deeper, diviner to-day than ever they were. 
So I know, then, that if Christ says nothing to 
me it is not because he is not speaking, but 
because I am deaf and do not hear. He has 
many things to say to us, but we cannot bear 
them now ; we need sorrow to interpret some, 
and temptation to interpret others ; for some 
the silence of the house of langour, for others 
the still more solemn silence of the house of 
death ; but, most of all, the obedient and 
responsive spirit without which we cannot 
interpret any. The Bible is a newer book to 
me to-day than when I first opened it to preach 
my first poor sermon. I think that I can 
preach to-day as I could not have preached ten 
years ago, and if God gives me grace and life 
I shall hope to preach in ten years' time as I 
cannot preach to-day. And one thinks of the 
closing words of Maurice. When his wife 
told him, as he lay dying on Easter Sunday, 
that it was the hour for service, he said, " Ah ! 
I shall never preach again on earth, but, please 
God, I intend to go on preaching in the worlds 
that are beyond." 

Some of you, perhaps, are full of alarm at 
the broken creed, the broken symbol, or the 
broken man. You witness with failing heart 
the destruction of symbols and the dissolution 
of creeds. You have leaned upon them, and 



72 NEHUSHTAN. 

they have snapped beneath your weight ; or you 
have leaned upon some human preacher, only 
to find him faulty like the rest of us, and far 
better able to preach the truth than to exem- 
plify it. We can conceive with what horror 
the Israelites would witness the daring act of 
Hezekiah, and it is with similar horror you 
watch the things in which you trusted going 
to pieces, till you seem to stand bare and naked 
under the very eye of God, with no sheltering 
or interpreting medium between you and the 
Eternal. If so, be sure that that is just where 
God means you to stand. Sacrilegious as 
Hezekiah 's act seemed, it is emphatically said, 
" He did right in the sight of the Lord," and 
it may be the truest witness that God is still 
working in the world that these violent dis- 
ruptions of creed and symbol do occur. But, 
whatever is shaken and destroyed, God and 
your own soul remain. God is a Spirit, and 
they that worship him need neither "this 
mountain nor Jerusalem ; " they must worship 
in spirit and in truth. Lift your eyes, then, 
above the broken symbol to the everlasting 
God. Beyond the rainbow of the symbol 
shines the sun of the Spirit, and without the 
sun the rainbow had not been. Lift your eyes 
from the broken man to the man Christ Jesus, 
tempted in all points like as we are, yet with- 



NEHUSHTAN. 73 

out sin. Lift your eyes from the broken creed 
to him who lives behind all creeds, the Lord, 
merciful and gracious, the Father who softly 
calls, " My son, give me thine heart ! " Let 
the broken creed itself be God's ministry to 
lead you into closer communion with him, and 
learn to realize how profoundly true are the 
well-known lines : 

" Our little systems have their day, 
They have their day and cease to be, 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And thou, O God, art more than they." 



If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
be persuaded through one rose from the dead. — Luke xvi, 
31. 

To fall away from that which has supreme being toward 
that which has less being, this is to begin to have an evil 
will. To wish to find out the causes of these defections, 
when they are, as I have said, not efficient but deficient, is 
tantamount to wishing to see darkness or to hear silence. 
Nevertheless, there are both things which we know very well, 
one by means of the eyes only, and the other only by means 
of the ears.-^SA Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book xii, 7. 



IV. 

THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 
AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION 

It is the last word of a conversation beyond 
the grave which is reported to us in this verse. 
If we are to realize its solemn force we must 
first realize that which seldom occurs to us 
amid the busy vanities and carnalities of our 
daily life, that there is indeed a spirit-world 
close to this, divided from it by the thinnest 
of curtains, and that there is for millions who 
once lived on this earth, at this moment, a 
life of conscious thought in that unknown and 
spectral realm. We have to realize the truth 
of that quaint saying, " A man is born but not 
buried, and w T hen he is buried he is not 
ended." Our friends who once spoke to us 
with human lips are still speaking, but in an- 
other language ; they are still suffering and en- 
joying ; they are still the centers in which 
thought and consciousness and action reside, 
and the drama of their life, which is terminated 
here, is being played out upon another stage, 
before another audience, and in a far more sol- 



78 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

emn environment. This is the point of view 
which we must reach before the full effect of 
this parable can break upon us; and familiar 
as the parable is, and has been, in the pulpit 
teaching of centuries, it may be doubted if a 
tithe of either readers, preachers, or congre- 
gations have ever thus become vividly con- 
scious of its tremendous reality. 

We have to recollect, on the other hand, 
that the entire story of Dives and Lazarus is 
a parable, and therefore is not to be accepted 
as literal truth in all its bearings. For what is 
a parable ? It is an illustration, and it is seldom 
that a flaw cannot be discovered in the aptest 
illustration, and almost impossible that any 
single illustration shall perfectly express a 
series of complex ethical truths. The parable 
is that which takes us out of the world of com- 
monplace fact into the world of the imagi- 
nation, and it exhibits familiar facts to us 
through the modifying or transfiguring light 
of the imagination. It follows, therefore, that 
a strictly literal interpretation of a parable 
often destroys its true significance, or so 
distorts it that the parable may be made 
to teach the very thing which its inventor 
would not have desired to teach, and omit 
the very element of truth which he meant to 
express. 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 79 

For if we apply, as is often done, this liter- 
al spirit to the interpretation of Christ's para- 
bles, what happens? We find ourselves at 
once entangled in a maze of difficulties. For 
example, apply such a method to the parable 
of the prodigal son, and what do we find? 
We cannot help feeling that if the father in 
that most touching of all stories is meant to 
represent God, then there are elements in his 
character which we could not conceive to be 
elements of the character of God. For we are 
not told that the father did any thing to restrain 
his younger son, that he ever reasoned with 
him on his conduct, that he ever pointed out 
to him the folly of his course, or that he ever 
inquired after his welfare after he had left 
home, and from these facts it would be quite 
possible to argue that the God of Christianity is 
a God who, is careless of his children, a cosmo- 
politan Eli, whose sons make themselves vile 
and he restrains them not. Or take such an 
illustration as the story of the unjust judge, 
who is moved to righteous vindication of the 
importunate widow, not because her cause was 
just, but because she troubles him ; and if the 
judge of that parable is meant to be a portrait 
of the Governor of the universe, then it is im- 
possible to avoid the inference that the Holy 
One of Israel is not holy, but unrighteous, and 



80 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

that the Maker of the heavens is not a moral 
ruler, but an immoral tyrant. Or take the con- 
cluding passages of this parable, and we cannot 
disguise from ourselves, whatever our theologi- 
cal predilections may be, that Dives showed 
some faint signs of an unselfish spirit in his 
thought for his brethren, and it is not possible to 
think of a soul in this state as forever outcast. 
These are samples of the peril of an exact and 
rigid interpretation of a parable. And there- 
fore we have to ask how Christ came to speak 
the parable, at what point in his argument did 
it occur, what was obviously intended to be 
its broad and general drift ? When we put 
these questions the reply is simple, for we see 
at once that what we call the parable of the 
prodigal son is really the parable of the 
elder brother, and is meant as a rebuke of 
Pharisaism; and that all that Christ would 
teach in the story of the importunate widow 
is that men will put a perfect passion of pa- 
tient endeavor into the effort to recover some 
paltry money-debt, but w r ill scarcely take the 
trouble to tell God what they want, or ask 
any thing of him, save with the formal non- 
chalance of suitors who never expect that he 
will do any thing for them. Fix your eye on 
these points of the parable, and you see the 
pivot on which all moves; miss these, and the 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 8 1 

spirit of the parable is wholly lost and igno- 
rantly misinterpreted. 

Now this parable has a double ethical teach- 
ing, and is aimed at two points. The first of 
these is the responsibilities of wealth, and, in- 
deed, of all forms of possession, whether 
amounting to what we call wealth or not. It 
forces home upon the conscience the truth 
that a man's use of his property here will 
shape his destiny hereafter, and that he who 
has possessed wealth here, and has used it 
only for personal ends and never for public 
and social ministrations, dies not merely dis- 
graced, but hopelessly condemned. Before 
the eyes of every selfish rich man in Christen- 
dom this parable stands like a spectral menace. 
The curtain of mystery which shrouds the fut- 
ure, and which Christ would not lift to sat- 
isfy the intellectual curiosities of men, is lifted 
for a single dreadful instant, that he may teach 
us our social duty. How many times Christ 
warned men against the corrupting love of 
money ! How often did he say that a man's 
possessions counted nothing with God, and 
were in effect not so much a blessing as a 
temptation, which made it hard for the rich 
man to enter the kingdom of heaven ! Here 
is all that he taught cast into dramatic form, 
and the last act is played out amid the terrors 



82 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

of hades, where unhealed woes seek an inef- 
fectual relief and the mind diseased finds all 
ministration impossible. If we were not over- 
whelmed with the spiritual force of the para- 
ble we might pause to notice with what su- 
perb power the picture is drawn, with what 
insight and daring, and with what a marvelous 
mastery of form and art there is compressed 
within a dozen sentences a drama which would 
gain nothing if it were expanded by the hand 
of genius into a dozen acts. But we have no 
time to think of this. It is the terrible truth 
of the representation which awes us and 
makes us unconscious of the method of its 
expression. And one wonders, as the solemn 
sentences of Christ break upon the soul, how 
it is that for centuries this parable has been 
read in the ears of selfish and uncharitable 
rich men without effect, and we see anew how 
profoundly true was the word of the Re- 
deemer, " Why do you not understand my 
speech ? Even because ye cannot hear my 
word/' 

But the second truth which this parable is 
meant to illustrate is the futility of the super- 
natural as an instrument in human conversion. 
Now that is not a conclusion which is generally 
accepted ; but I think that it is the distinct 
meaning of Jesus, and it is clearly in accord 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 83 

with his own repeated sayings. For Christ 
did not attach the same importance to mir- 
acles that we do. He more than once mani- 
fested the greatest reluctance to work them, 
because he saw that their total effect was to 
excite the curiosity of men, but not to trans- 
form their spirit. He repeatedly told those 
whom he had healed to tell no one, because 
he did not wish to be talked of as a necro- 
mancer or followed from those motives of idle 
curiosity which lead men to crowd round a 
magician. He never worked miracles of mere 
power; there was always some point beyond 
the miracle at which he aimed, some moral or 
charitable end to be reached, some blessing 
of which the miracle was the divine channel, 
and which justified it. And, lastly, Christ 
pathetically appealed to men to believe him 
for his word's sake; and it was only when they 
would not do that that he implored them to 
accept his works as his divine justification. 
The most, therefore, that the miracles can ever 
be is a series of glorious banners borne be- 
fore the armies of the conquering Christ, 
the splendid symbols and tokens of his king- 
dom, but not essential to it any more than 
the symbol of the harp or lion on the flag is 
essential to the existence of the empire which 
it represents, or the actual winning of the bat- 



84 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

tie into which it is borne triumphant. No ; 
the total effect of miracles as an instrument of 
human salvation is relatively small, and when 
Dives asks a miracle for the conversion of his 
brethren the reply is, *' If they hear not Moses 
and the prophets, neither will they be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead." 

Now let us assume the dramatic reality of 
this picture and examine it. This, or some- 
thing like it, is what this tortured rich man 
sees and thinks while he talks with Abraham 
in the dreadful world of spirits. He sees 
again the house where he had lived, the deep 
coolness of the luxurious rooms, the orange- 
blossoms waving in the court-yard, the splendor 
and ease of that home where he once had lived, 
and whose charm had often caused him an ex- 
quisite aesthetic joy in the days of his flesh. He 
sees also his five brethren, who now occupy 
the palace he has vacated, who are dressed as 
he was dressed in the soft linen of Egypt and 
the purple robes of Tyre, who fare sumptu- 
ously every day as he had fared on the dainti- 
est food that wealth can purchase, and whose 
life is in all respects a complete counterpart of 
what his own had once been. One feature in 
the familiar scene his brethren do not behold : 
they do not see the beggar at the gate, for he 
has gone forever. But they still remember 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 85 

him. In the old days they could not enter or 
depart through the court-yard without noticing 
that huddled mass of misery and beggardom 
which lay silent at the gate. They knew his 
features, distorted with disease, perhaps, cer- 
tainly emaciated with hunger, and the slow 
corrosion of many bitter thoughts. They 
probably resented his presence, as did Dives, 
and they doubtless left him to his unremem- 
bered misery. And now, if the plan of Dives 
can be carried out, this is what he proposes: 
he will wait for some night when his brethren 
are all together, and then, just when the feast 
is over and the lamp is lit, and there is silence 
in the room, Lazarus — the erstwhile beggar at 
the gate, whom they well know to be dead — 
shall stand among them. He shall stand 
among them not as he was — a glorified Laz- 
arus, yet the same ; a ghostly presence, with 
immortality clothing that soiled mortality of 
his ; incorruption drawn like a shining veil 
over the old corruption which it heals and ob- 
literates — and he shall reason with them. 
While the low-voiced talk goes round, sud- 
denly a shudder of alarm shall seize the five 
feasters, and, looking up, they shall behold the 
spectral visitor. And then this awful presence 
shall motion them to silence, and shall say: " I 
am a messenger from Dives, your brother. I 



86 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

am Lazarus, who once lay at your gate un- 
helped. I am now with Abraham in the par- 
adise of God. Dives, your brother, is now 
tortured in a pit of flame. He lived selfishly, 
and for this he now suffers the penal fire. You 
live as he lived, and because of this God has 
permitted me to be the messenger of Dives, 
and to warn you of your fate. His scorched 
lips now breathe through mine — mine that can 
thirst no more ; his agonized soul now utters 
itself through mine — mine that is bathed in 
the eternal peace of God ; and he bids you be- 
ware lest you also come to his place of torment. 
O, repent, reform, be charitable, be just, be 
kind ; share your abundance with the thousands 
who are now as I once was ; yea, if you will, 
I can guide you to the hovels where they lie 
unhelped, for in that brotherhood of misfortune 
which I once shared we all know each other, 
and the suffering are known to the suffering 
when all else, and the happy most of all, forget 
them." And then the vision would fade away, 
the mysterious voice would cease, and the 
sound of the shaken orange-blossoms, lightly 
stirring in the evening breeze, alone would 
fill the room with odorous music — and what 
then ? " Then/' thinks Dives, " my brethren 
will repent. They will have had terrific proof 
of the reality of that spirit-world about which 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 87 

they and I were alike incredulous, or, at least, 
never thought. They will rush forth to find 
the brethren of Lazarus, and will spend their 
wealth upon the poor and needy. They will 
open their doors to the dishoused and disin- 
herited, and say : ' Come, for all things are now 
ready/ The spirit of Lazarus will haunt 
them and be a wholesome terror, not to be 
shaken off; and when at last the hour comes 
they will die as just men and perfect, and will 
pass to the paradise which I have forfeited. " 
Will they? Will all this happen? Will the 
single visit of a messenger from hades accom- 
plish so great a reformation ? 

Cold and clear the voice of Abraham re- 
plies : " If they hear not Moses and the proph- 
ets, neither will they be persuaded though one 
rose from the dead." 

That is the reply of Abraham, and the more 
we consider it the more clearly shall we see 
that he was right. Dives deceives himself as 
to the effect of such a supernatural visitation, 
and if we consider what average human nat- 
ure is like we shall at once see how and why 
he is deceived. For, to begin with, one of 
the strongest and most general impulses of 
human nature is incredulity about truth, es- 
pecially when that truth is foreign to men's 
common thought and at variance with their 



88 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

common experience. Who believes the reve- 
lations of science when they are first stated? 
No one, or at most " a certain acute and hon- 
orable minority;" and it is only by incessant 
reiteration that they penetrate the average in- 
telligence and at last find general acceptance. 
Who believes, under similar conditions, the 
revelations of medicine, of chemistry, of me- 
chanics, of sociology, of discovery? It is the 
common testimony of history that it takes 
generations for a new idea to penetrate the 
popular mind, and that which we all believe 
to-day has been universally scoffed at in a yes- 
terday not very far removed. And if this be 
true of ideas, of statements which may be 
measured by logic, and which appeal to rea- 
son, how much truer must it needs be of su- 
pernatural revelations? How many people 
believe in ghosts ? How many people can be 
got to believe the best authenticated ghost- 
story, and for how long? How many persons 
would believe in ghosts even though they saw 
one ? How many, and among them the keen- 
est observers, would shrug the sarcastic 
shoulder and say cynically with Coleridge, 
that they " had seen too many ghosts to be- 
lieve in them ! " 

No ; there is another conclusion to the vis- 
ion of Dives, and a truer one. It is thus that 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 89 

the story should be finished. Presently the 
voice of Lazarus ceases, the odorous music of 
the shaken orange-blossoms is again audible in 
the room, and the shock of terror and surprise 
dies away, and the five brethren begin to say : 
" 'Tis a strange thing; is it true?" And the 
more they think of it the more certain they 
become that it is not true. Is it likely that a 
son of Abraham, a Pharisee, a rich man, a 
magnate in the city, is in torment, while Laz- 
arus, a nameless beggar, is in paradise ? Is it 
likely that Dives would send such a messenger 
even if he had such a message to communicate ? 
Ghosts! What are ghosts? Who would di- 
vide his property with the poor at the bidding 
of a ghost? It is a trick that someone has 
played upon them ; a cunning and well-acted 
trick got up in the interests of beggardom ; a 
socialistic ruse of the proletariat to extort 
money from their masters ; a clever trick, no 
doubt, but they can see through it, and he 
would be a fool who could not. So they pass 
from terror to suspicion, from suspicion to 
incredulity and anger, and when a night's rest 
has lulled the brain, and they have once more 
seen the honest daylight, they can even laugh 
at the whole thing, and the next night they 
will feast again in the same room, in the same 
way, with scarce a thought of Dives, and no 



90 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

thought at all of Lazarus. That is the true 
sequel of the vision ; that is what would hap- 
pen with any of us ; for if we do not discern 
God's will and God's vindication in the normal 
and natural, be sure of it we should see it still 
less in the supernatural ; if we hear not Moses 
and the prophets, neither should we be per- 
suaded though one rose from the dead. 

Look once more, and you will see that in 
another respect also Dives is mistaken. Not 
merely does he overlook the natural incredu- 
lity of man in regard to the supernatural, but he 
forgets that if a man is to be good he must be 
good under normal conditions, and has no right 
to ask for abnormal revelations as a help to 
the most elementary conditions of good con- 
duct. It is related that Heine and Hegel once 
dined together, and after dinner the poet and 
the philosopher walked out upon the balcony 
and looked at the stars. There rose the " ma- 
jestical roof fretted with golden fire," like a 
profound polished dome in which the lamps 
of God burned, and Heine, touched with the 
starry splendor, began to speak of the planets 
as the homes of the blessed, and, in reply to 
the contemptuous sneer of Hegel, said : 
" What ! is there no blissful spot above where 
virtue is rewarded after death ? " Hegel turned 
his dim eyes upon the poet, and said : " So you 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 91 

want a reward because you have supported 
your sick mother, and not poisoned your 
brother, do you ? " Bitter as the reply of 
Hegel is, it points the lesson which Dives had 
overlooked. God will not bribe us into virtue 
by visions of heaven, nor frighten us out of 
vice by visions of hell. Heaven and hell are 
not the alternate sweetmeat and rod of an in- 
capable celestial school-master. In the normal 
conditions of our life there is enough to teach 
us how God-would have us live, and there are 
ministries more than enough to enable us so 
to live, if we will use them. We have truth 
enough and light enough to live by already, 
and a visible ministry of angels could tell us 
nothing that is not already told us by human 
lips, by the records of history, by the prompt- 
ings of natural affection, by our conscience, and 
by the Spirit of God, who reveals the things 
of God severally to every man as he will. If 
you will not be honest where you are and with 
the knowledge you have no ministry of an- 
gels could teach you honesty. If you cannot 
find God in the ordinary services of the Church 
no risen Lazarus would convert you. If in the 
normal conditions of human life, which have 
been sufficient to foster the heroism, the un- 
selfishness, the constancy of long generations 
of saints and philanthropists and martyrs, you 



9^ THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

cannot be a good man, under no abnormal con- 
ditions would you ever be a better man than 
you are. If you hear not Moses and the 
prophets neither will you be persuaded though 
one rose from the dead. 

Look yet again, and you will see that what 
Dives says is in effect an apology, and a feeble 
one, for the selfish conduct of himself and his 
brethren. It amounts to this : " If I had 
known — if they could know." It implies that, 
through no fault of his, he has made a ruinous 
mistake in the conduct of life, and now, through 
no fault of theirs, his brethren are about to re- 
peat the tragic error. And upon whom, then, 
is the fault to be visited ? Who is responsible 
for the error which has brought Dives to this 
place of torment ? The inference is plain : if 
the blame does not rest on Dives it rests on 
God. For the words of Dives amount to an 
accusation of the Almighty, and the accusation 
is that he leaves his creatures with an insuf- 
ficient revelation of his will and then punishes 
them for unintentional and unblameworthy 
disobedience. If Dives had known his duty 
he would have done it; if his brethren knew 
their duty they would do it ; if neither knew, 
then the lack of knowledge is the fault of God, 
who failed to enlighten them. It is a frightful 
accusation, but it is as old as the world. Men 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 93 

will blame fate, heredity, environment, their 
circumstances, their temptations, and last of 
all their Maker, but never themselves, for the 
ruin of their lives. The literary biography of 
the world is full of such apologies. Only the 
other day I read in the press notices of a cer- 
tain dead playwright, whose life was notori- 
ously immoral: " For his shortcomings he 
was not responsible ; he was the victim of his 
organization." It is a convenient excuse, 
under which every thief, every murderer, every 
whoremonger may find ample shelter. And if 
we admit the philosophy of Dives to be cor- 
rect, then it is quite fair to argue that perhaps 
in the case of the murderer and thief and the 
whoremonger the revelation is not clear 
enough ; something more startling and terrific 
is needed to impress such natures ; if one rose 
from the dead these too might have believed. 
And since these are but typical instances of 
moral callousness we must needs go further, 
and claim that a special spectral revelation 
ought to be made in each particular case where 
sin abounds. We are all ready to assure our- 
selves that some such terrific experience of the 
spirit-world as this would at once arrest, trans- 
form, and convert us. We can all think of 
cases where, if the dead wife could appear to 
the profligate husband, or the dead mother to 



94 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

the reckless lad, it might prove a means of 
divine redemption, In other words, what 
we begin by demanding as a special in- 
fraction of law to meet a special case we 
should soon be demanding as a normal element 
in the affairs of the soul ; and if commerce 
with the dead were as normal a condition of 
life as converse with the living, how long would 
it be before such ministrations would be dis- 
missed with as contemptuous a pride as the 
ordinary human ministrations which seek to 
turn the sinner from the error of his ways ? 
Where the law and the prophets fail would 
the ghost succeed? If every man had his 
ghostly visitor, what reason is there to suppose 
that he would, in the long run, treat the mes- 
senger from hades or paradise with any more 
respect than he treats his conscience, which is 
the messenger of God within him ? 

" You have Moses and the prophets," is the 
answer to such an accusation, and it is a suffi- 
cient answer. The law of Moses, in a hun- 
dred particular and specific instructions, com- 
manded charity, social help, sympathy with 
the unfortunate, benevolence toward the suf- 
fering; and the prophets, in a hundred pas- 
sages which still roll like judgment-thunder on 
the ears of the world, denounce the man who 
adds land to land and house to house, and 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 95 

cares little for the poor man's rights, and still 
less for his wrongs and sorrows. That is the 
answer God makes us, and it may find its appli- 
cation in many forms. If we say to God, " Who 
is my neighbor?" the reply is, "The human 
heart will instruct you, for the revelation of love, 
and the duty of love, is made to every man, nor 
can any one misunderstand the revelation who 
desires to profit by it." If we complain of the 
intellectual difficulties of Christianity, God's 
reply is that at least the revelation of duty is 
made to every man, and he who does his duty 
as far as he knows it, honestly, fully, sincerely, 
is a worker of righteousness, and is accepted 
of God. If we complain that darkness rests 
over vast regions of the world of thought, and 
that in that darkness we are bewildered and 
perplexed, God replies that some portion of 
the truth, at least, is revealed to every man, 
and Christ says that all who are " of the 
truth," honest truth-lovers and truth-seekers, 
will hear his voice. The revelation of love, of 
duty, and of truth is made in some form to 
every man ; these are the law and the proph- 
ets which, if we obey, will make for our sal- 
vation. We do know, and nothing but our 
own willful and wicked error can prevent our 
knowing, the essentials of right conduct and 
wrong, the things which make for our peace or 



06 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

our eternal sorrow and condemnation. We do 
know that we ought to be kind and loving 
and charitable ; that it is our simple duty to 
be truthful and sincere; and that is the law 
and the prophets written on the fleshy tablets 
of every man's heart. We may know much 
more than this, but the question is not how 
much we know, but how much of our knowl- 
edge we put into practice. We may believe 
in a hundred doctrines and dogmas ; we may 
accept the death of Christ, the resurrection of 
the body, the judgment of the soul, literally 
and fully ; but unless we practice what we 
know of love, of duty, and of truth, we shall be 
in just the same position as Dives, who as a 
Pharisee accepted all the law and the proph- 
ets, and yet lived in such a spirit as to merit 
the place of torment. The morality of con- 
duct is that without which no soul shall see 
God, and there is no possible form of religion 
or redemption which can rescue a man from 
the hell which his own daily conduct is prepar- 
ing for him. Do not deceive yourselves. How- 
ever much the free grace of God may do for 
us, it does not permit us to escape the moral- 
ity of conduct, and the beatitudes of Jesus are 
not uttered in a single instance on the man 
who believes something, but always upon the 
man who is something. 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 97 

This saying of Christ's may be said, then, to 
declare the minimum of what a religious man 
must be. But if it be the minimum, it is the 
irreducible minimum. To possess all the vir- 
tues which Dives so conspicuously lacked, to 
be just and good and charitable, is the mini- 
mum of religion. Without these virtues you 
cannot even understand religion ; you will be 
as blind and callous as Dives was, who had 
known the law and the prophets all his life, 
and yet had never perceived that they had 
any actual bearing on his daily conduct. The 
inference which Christ permits us to draw 
from his words is that if Dives had acted dif- 
ferently toward Lazarus he might have been 
saved ; and it is, therefore, fair to argue that 
the just and good man, whoever he may be, 
will not fail to be accepted by that God who 
daily scrutinizes the conduct of men and is 
himself good and just. But one thing, at 
least, is certain, that if we are not good and 
just we shall not be saved ; nor, if we are un- 
sympathetic and selfish as Dives, are we saved, 
though we may say so a thousand times with 
glib insistance and make the church ring with 
the emphasis of our so-called " Christian testi- 
mony." 

And once more : if we are not saved it will 
not be because of an insufficient revelation. 
7 



98 THE FAILURE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

The demand for a revelation of God's will 
which shall be fresher, clearer, more personal 
and supernatural is a mere subterfuge by 
which we conceal our contempt for the revela- 
tion which is already given. If at this mo- 
ment in our midst one rose from the dead and 
said, " All that this man has spoken is solemnly, 
tragically, eternally true," I should not expect 
a single conversion which would be worth any 
thing as the result of that attestation. If now 
Lazarus and Dives were actually revealed to 
us, the one carried like a tired child in Abra- 
ham's bosom, the other like one of Dante's 
figures lifting his charred hands out of the un- 
quenchable flame, I should not expect any 
one to believe in Christianity to-morrow morn- 
ing who does not believe in it at this moment." 
And why ? Because the supernatural has al- 
ways failed to convert men. Like the friends 
of Hamlet, men are always ready, when the 
dreadful vision fades, to question its reality 
and explain away its significance. Pharaoh 
looked upon the supernatural in the most ap- 
palling forms of death and pestilence and 
terror, yet he hardened his heart more and 
more. There was a Lazarus who was raised 
from the dead, yet even after that the Jews 
sought to kill him. All the miracles of Jesus 
could not save him from the cross ; indeed, 



AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION. 99 

they did but whet the cruel anger of his ene- 
mies. Even his resurrection wrought no 
change of view among those who had cruci- 
fied him. He rose from the dead, and they 
were not persuaded. No ; it is not more 
proof we want, but more honesty in practicing 
the truth we already know. It is not the in- 
tellectual difficulties of Christianity which keep 
men from Christ ; more frequently it is insin- 
cerity and secret sin, and the intellectual diffi- 
culties of Christianity are simply thrust forward 
as an excuse for something wrong in the con- 
duct which they are eager to conceal. You 
may be imperfectly enlightened, but you can 
live up to the light you have ; you may be un- 
certain about theological dogmas, but you can 
practice the practical virtues you are sure of; 
for if you hear not Moses and the prophets, 
neither would you be persuaded though one 
rose from the dead. 



Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow- 
disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him. — John 
xi, 1 6. 

I think it al'ays the plan in a dilemma to pray God and 
walk forward. — George Meredith. 

Do the duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to 
be a duty ! Thy second duty will have already become 
clearer. — Thomas Carlyle. 



V. 

HEROIC DOUBT. 

JESUS is about to do his duty, and the only 
one of his disciples who is willing to stand by 
him is the man who has earned the title of the 
doubter. As knowledge increases and civiliza- 
tion becomes more complex those of the 
doubtful mind will become more numerous, 
and the need for dealing with them wisely 
will become the urgent duty of the Church. 
What can the Church say to the doubter ? 
There is only one clear and immediate counsel 
that can be given : Do what you can w r ith your 
doubts, but do your duty. The case of Thomas 
called Didymus affords us an excellent object- 
lesson of all that is conveyed by such counsel, 
and is, therefore, eminently worth our study. 

In the incident which is thus related by St. 
John we have another instance of Christ's own 
consecration to duty, his sublime sense of 
destiny, and his consequent fearlessness and 
absolute serenity. We are apt to smile at men 
who talk about the star of their destiny, and 
who have faith in themselves and their mission ; 



104 HEROIC DOUBT. 

but why? Simply because our own lives are 
so desultory and devoid of mission. For how- 
ever often such words may have been found on 
unworthy lips, nothing can impeach the fact 
that the great conquerors in the world's battle 
have always been men who were possessed 
with the sense of destiny. Napoleon, when he 
nourishes his ambition in obscurity with the 
sense that he has a great part to play ; Disraeli, 
when he tells a hostile House of Commons 
that they will hear him one day ; Luther, 
Knox, Newman, and a score of lesser names 
in every sphere of action^ might afford us ex- 
amples of the sense of destiny and what it can 
do for men. In each the ambition is directed 
to a different object, in each the quality of the 
ambition differs ; but in each the sense of des- 
tiny produces calmness, courage, resolution, a 
contempt for danger and defeat, a high heroic 
beating of the pulse, a serenity of temper, a 
composure of spirit, a definiteness of outlook, 
which in themselves go far to realize the object 
contemplated. And we cannot but look on 
and admire ; we feel that those who could 
conceive such purposes deserve to be the mas- 
ters of the world. 

In a diviner degree, in an infinitely nobler 
fashion, this sense of destiny was the strength 
of Jesus. " Are there not twelve hours in the 



HEROIC DOUBT. 105 

day? " he says. " I work to-day and to-morrow, 
and the third day I shall be perfected. I must 
work the work of him that sent me while it is 
day." These are the breathings of an heroic 
spirit ; they discover for us the intimacies of 
the heart of Christ. He is from the first not 
merely conscious of his mission, but of its 
tragic close. He is never deceived by tempo- 
rary popularity. He knows too well that he 
brings not peace, but a sword. He has settled 
matters with himself, and knows that he will 
die. But he is equally conscious of two other 
things : first, that his teaching will live ; 
secondly, that he will not die till his mission 
is complete. Before the inward force of this 
faith and resolution all mean obstacles vanish, 
and he moves through the world as one who 
has already overcame it. It invests him 
with a certain indefinable awe. More than 
once his disciples are amazed and afraid, for a 
certain unearthly dignity clothes him, a ra- 
diance of inexpressible majesty streams from 
him. And throughout all the troubled close of 
life his resolution stands out in clear contrast 
to their timidity, vacillation, and. lack of vision. 
It does so in this instance. He is returning to 
Judea, and all they can think of is the peril 
he incurs. Their love betrays their duty, as 
love so often does. They would fain keep 



106 HEROIC DOUBT. 

him from the grave of Lazarus, if they can 
thereby shelter him from harm. One only of 
the disciples shows a nobler temper. He has 
no clearer conception than the others of the 
ultimate meanings of Christ's mission, but he 
can recognize the heroism of Jesus and can 
share it. He knows, at least, that his place is 
his Master's side, whatever happens, and with 
despairing courage he cries, " Let us also go, 
that we may die with him." 

Now, we are apt to think of Thomas by a 
single isolated incident, and we do not see the 
unity of his character. By one of those strange 
miscarriages of justice which the slightest care 
might have prevented Thomas is usually pict- 
ured to us as a hard and unemotional man — 
the man of intellect, as opposed to the man of 
feeling. It is akin to the error which speaks 
of Gallio as a cynic, which is the very thing 
that he was not. That the spirit of Thomas 
was a questioning spirit is clear, but that it 
was hard and unemotional is the very reverse 
of the truth, as any one might know who thrills 
to that heart-breaking cry of his in the presence 
of the " wronged and risen Lord." If any man 
loved Christ with a passionate love it was 
Thomas. What more can a man do than be 
ready to die with Christ? Has not Christ 
himself said that to lay down one's life for a 



HEROIC DOUBT. 107 

friend is the consummation and glory of all 
sacrifice ? It is not from the purely skeptical 
character that such outbursts of enthusiastic 
devotion come. And it is this fact that makes 
it worth our while to investigate the character 
of Thomas. It is not a simple character like 
Peter's, and for that reason Thomas has been 
misjudged. Men have not taken the trouble 
to understand him, because they usually prefer 
hasty generalization to the close analysis of a 
complicated character. But the truth is that 
most characters are complicated. We are none 
of us altogether sheep or goats. We have no 
right to anticipate the last assize in our judg- 
ments of men, and the last judgment, be sure 
of it, will not ignore those complications of 
character in which qualities and the defects of 
qualities are inseparably intertwined. We may 
safely say that no man's character is only black 
or white ; there are a hundred gradations of 
color, which are visible to God if not to us, 
and the justice of God will take cognizance of 
these. 

The first thing which we discern in Thomas 
is the union of intellect and emotion, the keen- 
est intellect with the quickest emotion. He 
is a man who has intellectual vision ; he can- 
not make his judgment blind, and dare not 
if he could. It is to Thomas that Christ 



Io8 HEROIC DOUBT. 

addresses the great words, " I am the Way, 
the Truth, and the Life ; " and perhaps Christ 
meant in doing so to recognize the intellectual 
integrity of Thomas. He is one who can see 
the truth, who loves the truth, who will before 
all things be loyal to it. For him to love the 
truth is life, and the way of truth is the one 
way he will tread. Can we say that of our- 
selves ? Of how many can it be said ? How 
few are those who keep their intellectual hon- 
esty wholly unimpaired ! How great is the 
temptation to permit a little self-delusion, a 
little sacrifice of exactness, a little touch of 
sophism in our view of things, a little intellect- 
ual compromise in our way of putting things ! 
Who does not find that a little accommoda- 
tion of principles, a little judicious reticence, a 
little delicate casuistry are excellent things to 
smooth away the rough edges of life ; but that 
plain truth is a very difficult coin to get 
changed in this world's market ? We know 
these things, but we know also that in perfect 
loyalty to truth alone is salvation, self-respect, 
honor. We all have sufficient moral vision to 
know where truth lies. There is not a man 
among us who can honestly say he wants 
more light. What we want is more fidelity to 
the light we have. We have light enough to 
walk without stumbling ; if we stumble it is 



HEROIC DOUBT. IO9 

because we have chosen darkness rather than 
light. We never really need any one to tell 
us what our duty is ; we know it without tell- 
ing. We never need to be introduced to the 
truth ; the truth has already introduced itself 
to us. But we do need men to enforce duty 
and declare and impress truth upon us, simply 
because there are so few of us honest enough 
to accept truth without scruple when we know 
it to be truth. And because Thomas is a sin- 
cere man he has the clearest view of truth. 
He sees with bitter distinctness what the life 
of Christ means, in its earthly aspects. He 
needs no one to tell him that Christ means not 
peace, but a sword. He is under no pleasant 
delusion as to the results of Christ's interference 
in the lives of men. He sees clearly — he will 
die ; he feels deeply — let us also die with him. 
And I say again that it is a most false and 
imperfect generalization of character which 
ignores this union of intellect and emotion in 
men. We speak too often as if the servant of 
truth could never be the servant of love, as if 
the two were wholly separate and incapable of 
union. The typical man of emotion we pict- 
ure to ourselves in a man who intellectually 
cannot see an inch beyond his nose. Genera- 
tions of perverted emotionalism in religion 
have impressed it on the minds of men that 



IIO HEROIC DOUBT. 

the rudest form of feeling is superior to the 
noblest form of thought. It is the same with 
our common judgments of people in daily life. 
We assume that the man of culture must needs 
be cold, that the cultured woman cannot be 
lovable. We might be supposed to believe 
that the training of the mind meant the choking 
of the fountains of emotion, and that the more 
a man knew the less was he capable of love. It 
is this error in relation to women that Olive 
Schreiner so finely rebukes in her great ro- 
mance, when she says : " Do they see noth- 
ing, understand nothing? It is Tant'Sannie 
(the gross unthinking Boer woman) who buries 
husbands one after another, and folds her 
hands resignedly, and says, ' The Lord gave 
and the Lord hath taken away ' — and she 
looks for another. It is the hard-headed, 
deep thinker who, when the wife who has 
thought and worked with him goes, can find 
no rest, and lingers near her till he finds rest 
beside her. A great soul draws and is drawn 
by a more fierce intensity than any small one. 
By every inch we grow in intellectual height 
our love strikes its roots deeper and spreads 
out its arms wider." That I take to be the 
exact truth and nobly put. There never was 
a more foolish error than to suppose that the 
finest forms of emotion go with the poorest 



HEROIC DOUBT. Ill 

quality of intellect. It is Thomas, whom we 
call the Doubter, who is overcome with emotion 
at the thought of the peril of Christ, and says : 
" Let us also go, that we may die with him." 

When we have, then, to deal with men of 
keen intelligence, do not let us assume that 
they are sterile in emotion. Do not let us 
suppose that the questioning mind is the sign 
of the callous heart. Men have a right to ask 
questions, and to expect us to answer them. 
We have no right to ignore the demands of 
the intellect in religion. If we do we ourselves 
justify the contemptuous criticism which re- 
gards Christianity as a thing fitted only for 
fools and fanatics, for the imbecile and the 
narrow-browed, for the intellectually halt and 
lame and maimed of the human race. To 
ridicule the doubter, to jibe at his difficulties, 
to rave with illogical anger at " modern 
thought/' is not merely to prove ourselves 
fools and worse, but is to betray the cause of 
Christ. Nothing is more certain than that 
Christ set an example entirely opposite. How 
patiently he reasoned with his disciples ! How 
he tried to make things clear to them ! With 
what intellectual sympathy does he talk with 
Nicodemus, and the rich ruler, and the woman 
by the well of Sychar ! In what a spirit of 
tenderness does he treat the man who could 



112 HEROIC DOUBT. 

only say, " I believe: help thou my unbelief! M 
There is no touch of intellectual arrogance in 
Christ, no attempt to stifle the honest ques- 
tionings of men, no desire to dethrone the rea- 
son for the sake of the emotions. He was the 
way, the truth, and the life; not one, but each 
and all. He was the way — the perfect exam- 
ple of character and conduct; the life, the 
mysterious source of life in others, commu- 
nicated in ways which the intellect cannot de- 
fine ; but he was also the truth, the lover of 
truth, the witness of truth, the martyr of 
truth ; and therefore whensoever he found a 
love of truth in others he respected it, and pre- 
ferred the sincerity of honest doubt to the 
shifting emotionalism which cries, " Lord ! 
Lord ! " and kept not his words. He teaches us 
that the claims of the heart and intellect are 
not rival, but equal claims. To neither must be 
yielded too much. It is not by blind and unintel- 
ligent emotionalism we best serve God, and still 
less by mere intellectual acquiescence. To the 
heart we say, " I must not only feel, I must 
know ; " to the intellect the reply of the heart, 
heard amid all the sorrowful bewilderments of 
life, is, 

" Ay, tho' thou then should'st strike him from his glory, 
Blind and tormented, maddened and alone ; 

Even on the cross would he maintain his story, 
Yes, and in hell would whisper, / have known."" 



HEROIC DOUBT. 113 

And the will of God is neither the salvation 
of heart nor mind alone as separate factors, but 
that the whole soul and spirit and body be 
consecrated unto him, which is our reasonable 
service. 

We find again in Thomas the union of faith 
and doubt, the one expressing the thought of 
the heart, the other of the mind. He doubts the 
wisdom of Christ's decision to go into Judea, 
and in this doubt all the disciples share. But 
he has the faith that works by love, and he has 
the love which casts out fear, and makes him 
ready to die with Christ. The doubt of Thomas 
is the despondence of a great spirit. It breathes 
like a gentle sigh through that other saying of 
his,' " Lord, we know not whither thou goest, 
and how can we know the way? " He was, 
perhaps, one of those men through whose 
natures a vein of tender melancholy runs. 
Such men are like delicate musical instru- 
ments, the brilliance of whose tone suffers by 
the slightest change of temperature ; they 
often suffer by the physical oppression of 
the robust, who little know how their unsym- 
pathetic brusqueness sets sensitive nerves jar- 
ring, and how their rough touch sets old 
bruises aching; their life moves in an orbit 
where transitions are rapid and frequent ; they 
have their bright moments and their dark ; 
8 



114 HEROIC DOUBT. 

they are of unequal temperament ; they re- 
ceive all impressions acutely because they are 
acutely sensitive ; their joy is ecstasy, their suf- 
fering is agony, their disheartenment is despair. 
Think of such men as Dr. John Brown, the au- 
thor of Rab and His Friends, in whom humor 
and melancholy lay so close together ; of 
Charles Lamb, whose laughter is the foil to 
such unutterable despair ; of Coleridge, with 
his gleams of celestial light breaking out of 
bitter darkness ; of Johnson, with his sturdy 
faith ever struggling through the inertia and 
gloom of hypochondriac fancies ; of Cowper, 
who can write with such delicate humor, such 
freshness of touch, such inspired faith and joy, 
and yet can die saying, " I feel unutterable de- 
spair." Think even of a man of action, and 
heroic action, like Abraham Lincoln, whose 
laughter was the relief of hereditary brooding 
melancholy, and was, as he said, " the vent/' 
which saved him from a frenzied brain or 
broken heart. Such men may furnish us with 
a hint of what Thomas, called Didymus, may 
have been. I think that his, too, was a tender, 
brooding, intensely sensitive nature. He 
dwelt in the exceeding brightness or the black- 
ness of darkness. His quick intelligence per- 
ceived things with an infinite clearness of 
vision, and they were things which often he 



HEROIC DOUBT. 1 1 5 

would rather not have seen. He had none of 
the blindness of Peter to the shadow of com- 
ing events. He never debated as John did 
who should be the first in the kingdom. He 
followed Christ because he could not help it ; 
but he knew it was to judgment and death. I 
He doubted not because he would, but be- [ 
cause he must; and it was out of that cloud 
of unutterable misgiving that he sent forth 
this heroic cry, " Let us also go, that we may 
die with him." 

Surely he has studied history with small ef- 
fect who has not noticed this frequent despond- 
ency of great spirits. Every-where the spec- 
tacle meets us, till we are almost justified in 
concluding that the greater and deeper the nat- 
ure the more certain is it to know its fits of 
despondence. Does not Isaiah cry, " I have 
labored in vain," and Elijah, " O Lord, take 
away my life, I am not better than my fa- 
thers," and St. Paul contemplate the awful pos- 
sibility that he himself may become a casta- 
way ? Who is not familiar with the saying of 
Marcus Aurelius, " I shall die, and people will 
say, i We are glad to get rid of this school- 
master ; ' M and of Roger Bacon, " Men are not 
worth the trouble I have taken over them?" 
Does not St. Bernard say, " I have done al- 
most nothing ?" and does not Calvin confess in 



Il6 HEROIC DOUBT. 

the bitterness of his heart, " All I have done 
has been worth nothing ; the wicked will 
welcome this word, but I say again, all I have 
done has been worth nothing, and that I am 
a miserable creature?" Even so robust and 
strong a nature as Luther's has its hours of 
despair, when the reluctant confession is made, 
" We must take men as we find them ; we 
cannot change their nature." Surely such in- 
stances as these should teach us to be sympa- 
thetic with the doubtful. It is not your blunt- 
natured, thick-witted man, who never has a 
doubt, nor a scruple of misgiving, nor even a 
momentary questioning of his own infallibility, 
who is the highest type of believer, or the one 
mo^t to be admired. The man who tells me, 
" I never had a doubt in my life, sir," rather 
reveals a deficiency in his own nature than re- 
bukes one in mine. There are moments, no 
doubt, when we envy his serene assurance, 
but a little reflection will soon teach us that he 
is not to be envied. The nobler soul is that 
which has been made perfect through suffer- 
ing ; which has come up out of great tribula- 
tion undismayed ; which has been the worst 
but still believed the best, has touched the 
deep and yet struggled toward the starry 
height; the fugitive who has wrestled with the 
angel in the night and prevailed ; the doubt- 



HEROIC DOUBT. 117 

ing disciple who from the thick of mortal an- 
guish can cry with the despair of heroism, 
" Let us also go, that we may die with him." 
In such there is wrought out a new nature, 
and to such there is given a new name ; for 
they have wrestled with God and have pre- 
vailed. 

Think of this, and measure all that it means, 
and you will see that the doubt of some men 
is a truer faith than the so-called faith of 
others. 

" There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half your creeds." 

Do not despair, then, ye who doubt. Do 
not despair when men of different and denser 
nature utter hard words about you and treat 
your doubt as though it were a willful and the 
worst of sins. Christ never said that. Christ 
could not have said that. A man's real creed is 
after all only that which he has won for himself 
by personal struggle, and no other creed is 
genuine and vital. I can afford a large ward- 
robe if I do not pay for it, and it is easy 
enough to have an ample creed if you have 
accepted it without inquiry and on the assur- 
ance of others. But I prefer a shorter creed, 
if every article of it has been a battle-field 
where I have overcome and a Bethel where 
God has met and blessed me. Examine your 



I 1 8 HEROIC DOUBT. 

creeds and realize how little of them you really 
believe in your heart of hearts. For in such a 
self-examination the great rule of Savonarola 
reigns, and no other : " a man only believes 
\ really that which he practices." You believe 
in Jesus Christ; do you practice his teachings? 
Do you live his life ? Are you of his mind 
and temper and spirit? You believe in a final 
judgment ; do you conduct your business with 
the ever-present sense that God will one day 
examine your ledgers, and demand account of 
you for the way in which every shilling you 
possess has been acquired and spent? You be- 
lieve in immortality ; are you living daily as 
an immortal creature should, as one who is in- 
deed the heir of God and the joint-heir with 
Jesus Christ? You believe in a heaven of 
the spirit ; are you so shaping your character 
that heaven may be no surprise to you, but 
the exact environment for which the spirit of 
your earthly life has fitted you ? It is by such 
tests alone that all creeds must be tried. It 
is by the result of such tests that their worth 
or worthlessness must be ascertained. And 
therefore I say that a short creed which is 
real is better than a long creed which has no 
root in the heart or life ; that an honest doubt 
is often " faith in the making; " that doubt 
nobly searched and suffered is better than 



HEROIC DOUBT. II9 

faith lightly held and insincerely paraded ; 
that to say, " I believe, help thou my unbelief," 
is a nobler attitude of mind by far than to 
say, " Lord ! Lord ! " and do not the words 
which Christ says. 

We have intellect and emotion, doubt and 
faith, in Thomas ; but there is one other com- 
bination also — despair and heroism, the doubt- 
ing mind but the resolved and dutiful soul. 
He doubts the wisdom of Jesus, but he is not 
afraid to die with him. A hundred wild 
thoughts go whirling through his heart, but 
there is one supreme thought which abides — 
his place is at the side of Christ, whatever 
happens. If nothing else is clear, the duty of 
friendship is clear. Let it be granted that 
Christ is willful, foolhardy, reckless in his cour- 
age ; that he is rushing upon certain death ; 
that he is tempting his enemies to violence ; 
that it would be far better for the cause and 
the kingdom if he would obliterate himself 
for awhile, if he would be silent, if he would* 
retire into a desert place till this strife of 
tongues is overpast ; all this Thomas honestly 
thinks and believes; but there is one thing 
that remains clear, undimmed, absolutely im- 
perative, a star of guidance which no darkness 
can obscure — Christ is the Master still, Thomas 
is the disciple, and with Christ he must stand 



120 HEROIC DOUBT. 

or fall. He has not eaten the bread of Christ 
for nothing; he has not dwelt so long in that 
most tender intimacy to be false now ; he has 
not witnessed the superb courage of his Lord 
from day to day to become traitorous and 
cowardly now. Here is a piece of duty, clear, 
distinct, indisputable. It is not easy to die 
for a cause in which you believe ; Thomas is 
prepared to die for a cause which to him is 
doubtful. It is the heroism of the soldier who 
goes with steady pulse upon the forlorn hope, 
knowing well that it is forlorn, and that he will 
never return. Why does he do it? Because 
he is a soldier, and has a captain, and has 
learned to obey. It is the higher courage, 
not the thoughtless daring of iron nerves and 
animal vigor, but the still, resolved courage of 
an intensely sensitive soul, conscious of shrink- 
ing, of fear, of questioning, but resolved to do 
right though the heavens fall. You will have 
heard the story which Napier relates of a 
young officer riding down into his first bat- 
tle, with pale face and trembling hand, when 
a companion, looking at him, said, " Why, 
man, you're pale ; you're afraid ! " "I know I 
am," he quietly rejoined ; " and if you were 
half as much afraid as I am you would run 
away." That was courage, the higher cour- 
age ; the flesh failing for fear, every nerve trem- 



HEROIC DOUBT. 121 

bling, loosened,.unstrung, but the soul resolved 
and calm, ordering the body to its duty. And 
that was the spirit of Thomas : he can at least 
die with Christ. 

" Shall Jesus bear the cross alone, 

And all the world go free ? 
No ; there's a cross for every one, 

And there's a cross for me." 

That is the meaning of Thomas's speech, 
and the very fact that he thinks that the peril 
and the cross should be avoided invests with a 
sublimer glory his sacrifice of self in facing them. 
Few more heroic sayings have ever been re- 
corded in history than this : " Let us also go, 
that we may die with him !" 

We can all do what Thomas did ; we can do 
our duty. Our doubts and difficulties are not 
the same as those of Thomas, but they admit 
of the same solution. He thought Christ mis- 
taken, but he followed him ; he followed with an 
agnostic mind but a loving heart. He could not 
read the secret of Jesus, nor, in another sense, 
can we ; yet we also can followjesus and love 
him and die for him. For whosoever ap- 
proaches Jesus Christ is met by four great se- 
crets of Christianity, four great mysteries of 
the faith : the incarnation, the resurrection, 
the atonement, and the promise of immortal- 
ity and redemption through the death of 



122 HEROIC DOUBT. 

Christ. We are as unable to grasp these mys- 
teries as Thomas was the need for the cross in 
the life of Christ ; but that is no reason why 
we should not follow him as Thomas did. 
Who does really understand these mysteries? 
Is there any theologian who has actually ex- 
plained either, or made them possible to the 
human intellect ? Who can compass the idea 
of God born of a woman, of a crucified one 
rising on the third day in quickened and liber- 
ated life, of a redemption through his death, 
of personal immortality assured to us through 
mere faith in him ? Intellectually these ideas 
are impossible, because we have no symbols of 
thought by which to express them, no data of 
knowledge by which to compare them. The 
keener the intellect which applies itself to 
the task the more certain is it of failure, be- 
cause the more numerous will be the difficul- 
ties which it will discern. And that is pre- 
cisely where men make so fatal a mistake ; 
they try to force themselves into faith by a 
process of reason, to apprehend intellectually 
that which can only be spiritually discerned. 
And that is where religious teachers blunder 
also; they make the intellectual reception of 
these mysteries the condition of the Christian 
life, and in doing so they ask more than man 
can give, more than God demands, and make 



HEROIC DOUBT. 1 23 

intellectual arrogance the stepping-stone to 
Christian faith. It is an attitude for which no 
justification is possible. I may candidly own 
that with my intellect I cannot comprehend 
the incarnation or the resurrection, the atone- 
ment or immortality. I can only say — or, 
rather, my intellect says with complete rever- 
ence, with the humility of a true agnosticism 
— " I do not know." But it does not there- 
fore follow that I am not a Christian, that I do 
not believe in Christ, that I am not at this mo- 
ment conscious of his saving power and 
blessed presence. I may be alive without 
knowing any thing of physiology ; my heart 
may beat though I cannot tell how it beats, 
and have never heard of the circulation of the 
blood. I may be conscious without under- 
standing the philosophy of consciousness ; I 
may think without knowing how thought is 
generated ; I may be a good citizen with but 
small knowledge of my country's law ; and a 
good soldier with small understanding of im- 
perial politics. And so I may be a good 
Christian, though I can prove neither to my 
own nor any other person's satisfaction the 
credibility of the incarnation, the resurrection, 
or the atonement. It is not stubbornness of 
intellect, but humility, that says in such a 
case, " I do not know." It is not pride, but 



124 HEROIC DOUBT. 

honesty, that cries at the feet of Christ, " I be- 
lieve, help thou my unbelief." I am content 
to eat of the fruit of life, though I know not 
how it grew ; to drink of the water of life, 
though I know not by what spring it came ; to 
open my heart to Christ, though I know not 
by what mysterious process he fills my being. 
The working knowledge that we need for the 
Christian life is relatively small. Christianity 
is not a thing of high philosophies and subtle 
inferences ; it moves along the plane of com- 
mon life; it proves itself by the silent revela- 
tion of its power to save within the heart. It 
asks of us nothing more than to do our duty 
in the sight of God, to let our hearts go out in 
love toward God and man, to recognize in 
Jesus Christ the type of all perfection, to sur- 
render ourselves to him and seek to be like 
him by simple faith and daily practice, and 
thus to rest in him for redemption. You can 
begin to be a Christian anywhere, for the ele- 
ments of Christianity are so simple that none 
is debarred from the attempt. To do justly 
and walk humbly with your God, to fear him 
and to work righteousness, to live up to the 
highest light that he reveals to you, to be 
ready to be sacrificed with Christ as Thomas 
was, to be accepted in him, is to be saved, is to 
be a partaker of eternal life. 



HEROIC DOUBT. 125 

Do you remember that most touching pas- 
sage in which George Eliot describes the great 
temptation of Maggie Tulliver? 

u Many things are difficult and dark to me," 
says Maggie, " but I can see one thing quite 
clearly — that I must not, cannot, seek my own 
happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natu- 
ral ; but surely pity and faithfulness and mem- 
ory are natural too. And they would live in 
me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. 
I should be haunted by the suffering I had 
caused. Faithfulness and constancy mean 
something else besides doing what is easiest 
and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean re- 
nouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance 
others have in us ; whatever would cause mis- 
ery to those whom the course of our lives has 
made dependent on us." 

So she triumphed. Many things may be 
dark and difficult to us, and so alone shall we 
triumph. 

Here, then, lies the great lesson of such a 
subject as this. No amount of doubt can re- 
move from us the obligation of duty. A man's 
first duty is to do right, and properly consid- 
ered that is his only duty. Do that simply 
and sincerely, and half the problems which 
perplex and sting you will recede into the 
background and be solved of themselves. We 



126 HEROIC DOUBT. 

may not be sure of many things, but of this 
we are always sure — that to do right is always 
the safe course, the right course, the only wise 
course. We may walk in clouds and dark- 
ness intellectually, but here at least is solid 
ground. 

41 It's wiser being good than bad, 

It's safer being meek than fierce, 
It's fitter being sane than mad. 

My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched, 

That after Last returns the First, 
Tho' a wide compass first be fetched. 
That what began best can't end worst, 
Nor what God blest once prove accurst." 

There is but one right thing in all the world 
for any man ; do that, for the way of victory is 
here alone. When you are perplexed by casu- 
istries of conduct ; when you are tempted to 
do things which offer great gains at the price 
of what seems an infinitesimal loss of self-re- 
spect ; when you are told " every body does 
it," as though that made it right, " nobody 
will blame you for it," as if that altered its es- 
sential nature, then there is but one way of 
conquering the Gordian knot ; it is to ask one 
swift, searching, simple question, Is it right? 
Is it just? Is it Christlike? and to abide by 
the result. Most of our difficulties of conduct 
disappear instantaneously on the asking of 



HEROIC DOUBT. \2J 

that question. It is like the shrill cry of the 
bird of dawn before which ghosts and specters 
of the night vanish ; it is the herald of the 
light. 

There is no one of us who cannot apply 
that talisman, no one who cannot work out 
his deliverance by its means. Listen, O my 
soul, to that clear ringing voice of duty ; for — 

" He that ever following her commands, 

On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 

Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 

His path upward and prevailed, 

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 

Are close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our God himself is moon and sun." 

To the man who tells me that he does not 
believe in creeds I reply then, All the more 
obligation is laid upon you to show the world 
how much better you can live without creeds 
than the bulk of men with thern. To the man 
who tells me that he is in doubt as to Christ's 
teaching or the Church's presentation of that 
teaching, I reply, You can at least discern the 
purity, the love, the mind and temper of Jesus, 
and you can copy them. It is yours to ac- 
knowledge him in your daily life as the Master 
of your thoughts, the inspiration of your con- 
duct, the type of all perfection. You may not 
speak with tongues, nor know all mysteries ; but 
you may have that passionate, heroic love which 



128 HEROIC DOUBT. 

cries, "Let us also go, that we may die with 
him; " and to have that is to be a Christian, for 
the Christianity of noble conduct is the only 
Christianity which is worthy of that sacred 
name. 



In my Father's house are many mansions : if it were not 
so, I would have told you. — St. John xiv, 2. 

The difficulty of so many intellectual men in these days 
is to know where the intellectual questions end and the 
purely religious ones can be said to begin. . . . The religious 
life is based upon authority ; the intellectual life is based upon 
personal investigation. — Philip G. Uamerton^ The Intellect*- 
ual Life. 

9 



VI. 

THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

One of our best writers, in an excellent 
monograph on Wordsworth, has quoted cer- 
tain lines, in which the poet speaks of the ad- 
vance of age : 

" Age steals to his allotted work 

Contented and serene, 

With heart as calm as lakes that sleep 

In frosty moonlight glistening, 

Along a channel smooth and deep 

To their own far-off murmurs listening." 

And in commenting on them he asks, " What 
touch has given to these lines their impress of 
an unfathomable peace? For there speaks 
from them a tranquillity which seems to over- 
come our souls ; which makes us feel, in the 
midst of toil and passion, we are disquieting, 
ourselves in vain ; that we are traveling to a 
region where these things shall not be ; that so 
shall inordinate fear leave us and inordinate love 
shall die." It is thus that the spirit of Words- 
worth impresses all his readers ; it is a spirit of 
unfathomable peace. No one has better de- 
scribed the effect he produces than Matthew 



132 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

Arnold, when he speaks of " Wordsworth's 
healing power." Why is this? What is the 
secret ? The secret is that Wordsworth speaks 
to a vexed and troubled world as one who has 
overcome the world. He is one who cared lit- 
tle for its praise and nothing for its blame; he 
was strong enough to turn from its crowding 
ambitions without regret, and humble enough 
to find in simple sights and sounds sufficient 
joy; and it is this moral fact which gives his 
poetry such penetrating sweetness, such per- 
vasive calm. 

In like manner we may ask what is the se- 
cret of that " unfathomable peace, of that tran- 
quillity which overcomes our souls," which we 
discover in this fourteenth chapter of St. 
John's gospel? The secret is that Christ also 
has overcome, but with a victory beyond our 
computation. He has attained a peace, but 
so profound and perfect that it lies wholly out- 
side our analysis. It is the peace of God which 
. passeth understanding — that is, we cannot at 
all realize what it means and is by our under- 
standing. We can feel it, but we cannot ex- 
plain it. " It lies round you like an atmosphere. 
It dwells in you like a fragrance. It goes from 
you like a subtle elixir vitae." It overwhelms 
the soul ; it is the very peace of God. 

Some of the elements of this perfect peace 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 1 33 

it is possible for us to distinguish, however. 
The most casual student cannot but perceive 
that this calm of Christ springs from conquest 
of self and heroic allegiance to duty. We are 
sure that these are elements in the serenity of 
Christ, because we know from all too bitter 
experience that two thirds of our common 
discords and distractions spring from unsubju- 
gated self and neglect of duty. That w T hich 
men call intellectual doubt is often nothing 
more than a disease which springs from the 
unhappiness of self and scorn of simple duty. 
How often is the doubter an egoist, and, be- 
cause an egoist, one who shrinks from the 
homely duties of a common humanity with 
disdain! How true is it that when all the 
other devils are whipped out of the soul the 
one little capering devil of vanity remains and 
proves more troublesome than all the rest put 
together ! The only real cure of souls is the 
extirpation of self; then only is it possible for 
the peace of God to interpret itself to us. It 
is in the great stream of service to humanity 
that the leprosy of egoism is washed away, that 
the irritation of a miserable vanity is healed, 
that a new self is developed, tremblingly con- 
scious not of personal pains, but of human sor- 
rows, and so the flesh becomes firm and sound 
again like the flesh of a little child. This is 



134 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

one lesson of the calm of Christ which is clear 
to all, and appeals to all ; for it is certain that 
this cloudless serenity can only belong to one 
who has lost the uneasy sense of self in larger 
aims and visions ; it is in truth a peace that 
" the world can neither give nor take away/' 

Yet the fact remains that Christ has over- 
come. His peace is something that has been 
won. The obstructions to peace that we feel 
are obstructions which he, too, has felt. The 
difficult and disturbing questions that we feel 
he, too, felt and overcame. If we cannot preach 
a Christ who knew the limitations and trials 
of a real humanity, who did actually taste the 
cup of bitterness which we taste, who was act- 
ually, and by no jugglery of words, " tempted 
in all points," like as we are, " yet without 
sin " — if we cannot preach this Christ, we have 
no Christ to preach. No other Christ is serv- 
iceable to humanity — to the humanity that 
doubts, struggles, suffers, and aspires in a 
thousand daily agonies. We may not be able 
to explain in the least degree how it was pos- 
sible for Christ to fathom the temptations of 
humanity ; whether by the actual pressure of 
evil upon him in daily solicitation, or by the 
vision of it, in supernatural concision and dis- 
tinctness, or through the power of a sympathy 
so keen and catholic that he was able to think 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 1 35 

every body's thoughts, to feel every body's feel- 
ings, to know by one swift glance into a man's 
heart what each heart would know of suffer- 
ing, so that literally the sins of the world were 
laid upon him, because he felt the process of 
each man's sin, without sharing it or being 
stained by it — all this we may be unable to ex- 
plain, nor is it necessary that we should ex- 
plain it. It is enough to know that in some 
way Christ did know, and suffered all that we 
endure of temptation, of whatever form ; that 
he knew it in its essence, if not in its particu- 
lar form ; and that he vanquished all. And it 
is this truth which gives such penetrating em- 
phasis to this brief sentence : u If it were not 
so, I would have told you." It bespeaks at 
once Christ's knowledge of our intellectual 
temptations and his candor in treating of 
them ; and it teaches us the duty of candor in 
relation to the difficulties of faith. 

Now, let us examine the spirit and temper 
of these words, and the first thing that strikes 
us is a quality which is always rare, and it. re 
even in great teachers — open-mindedness. Wc 
feel that we do not stand in the presence of a 
mere doctrinnaire, a dogmatist with a few nar- 
row axioms which he forces on us at the 
sword's point, but a great-hearted, sympathetic 
teacher, who admits the difficulties of belief 



I36 THE CAN&Ofe OP CHfclST. 

and the reasonableness of those difficulties. 
Half the revolt against belief rises from no 
other cause than the intolerance of believers. 
Their very certitude irritates us ; their strident 
accent of infallibility disgusts and repels us ; 
their glib dogmatism enrages us. They ad- 
mit no difficulties where, to the reasonable 
mind, the way is hedged with difficulty; they 
hold no parleying with our questionings, be 
they never so honest and intelligent. For the 
doubter, contact with such men can have only 
one result : confirmation in his doubts, and 
yet further and angrier revolt from accepted 
platitudes. To such a teacher himself the re- 
sult is yet more disastrous ; it is narrowness 
of vision and constriction of sympathy. For 
to be open-minded is to have a mind which is 
a chamber whose windows stand wide to 
the universe, looking out upon illimitable dis- 
tances and receiving impressions from a thou- 
sand various' sources ; to be the reverse of this 
is to be narrow-minded, to have a mind which 
is a chamber wherein all the windows but one 
are jealously shuttered and closed fast against 
any vision which we do not wish to receive. 
The one-roomed life has its counterpart in the 
one-window r ed mind, lit only by a narrow sun- 
beam, and therefore imperfectly lit, and full of 
inadequacy and confusion. 



THE Candor Of Christ. 137 

This was not the mind of Christ, nor was 
this his temper. His mind was like a broad 
lake receiving myriads of impressions from 
shifting clouds and changing skies ; not the 
little basin of water at the bottom of a well, 
reflecting some isolated fragment of the blue 
sky and a star or two. He talked with all 
sorts of men, and in many different ways. He 
met men half-way in their difficulties by the 
kindly omniscience of a great sympathy. He 
divined their thoughts, their lurking doubts, 
their uncomfortable questionings, and by his 
sympathy gave them help in uttering them — 
and conquering them. And now, as he talks 
to men who see the whole dream of their life 
vanishing ; who feel as if with his dreaded de- 
parture every certainty of the present and fut- 
ure is departing too ; whose uneasy thoughts 
flutter over grim depths, and find no resting- 
place of certainty — now he divines these 
thoughts, and sympathizes with them, and 
does not rebuke them. It is as though he 
said : " I, too, have asked these questions ; in 
my temptations I also have met this angel of 
darkness and heard this awful whisper at my 
ear ; I know how easy it is to ask, in moments 
when hope is ruined, when purposes are 
broken, when life, in its alternate futility, mo- 
notony, and brevity seems to mock us, ' Is 



I38 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

there any thing beyond ?.' — and, behold, what 
interest have I in deceiving you? 'In my 
Father's house are many mansions : if it were 
not so, I would have told you.' " 

Here, then, you see a willingness to face the 
darkest things in human destiny, and in this 
the candor of Christ is manifest. Christ knew 
well that from the beginning of the ages men 
have asked, Is there a God? Is there a be- 
yond ? Is human separation at the grave 
transient or final? These are questions which 
are not peculiar to individuals or to abnormal 
conditions of feeling ; every one has asked 
them, and they have been asked from the be- 
ginning. A celebrated Frenchman has painted 
in glowing colors the spectacle of Lake Geneva, 
with all its fringe of happy homes, its towns 
and villages, the glittering robe of civilization 
which to-day clothes its shores. But then he 
recollects there was a time when the song of 
the vintager was not heard, and the time may 
come again when a profound stillness may 
clothe these shores where to-day the life of 
man runs its restless courses. And what 
then ? Why, the lake will still be there, and 
these mountains, which we are tempted to call 
eternal as we travel to our quiet resting-places 
at their feet, will still lift into the blue sky 
their glittering pinnacles and soaring domes, 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 1 39 

untouched by any breath of change or havoc 
of mortality. So, says he, there are questions 
which are the alps of thought, the primeval 
questions which underlie all thought, all hope, 
all civilization — and these are among them. 
The savage, trembling at the passage of the 
storm-wind, which seems the breath of God ; 
the fire-worshiper, bowed before his mountain 
altar; the Faust of mediaeval times, seeking 
the source of life in his laboratory; or the 
Hamlet, pouring out the passionate misery of 
the universal soul in wild misgiving — all these, 
and not less the men of to-day, ask the old 
questions: " Is there a God? Is there a be- 
yond ? " The cry is repeated in every awaken- 
ing mind and beside every death bed. He 
would be worse than foolish who, calling him- 
self teacher of others, ignored such questions 
or attempted to shelve them with a plausible 
excuse. Men who are only too bitterly con- 
scious of the futility of life because their high- 
est ideal is being withdrawn from them, who 
look with fascinated eyes and breaking hearts 
upon the spectacle of a vanishing Christ, a lost 
cause, an imminent cross of shame and defeat, 
may well be asking these questions now. 
There will come a time when they will ask no 
more questions, for they will have looked upon 
the " wronged and risen Lord." But that time is 



140 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

not yet. This is the hour and power of dark- 
ness. Let such questions be asked then. Let 
the Master himself recall the desert and the 
devil when this horror, of darkness came upon 
him in the hour before the angels ministered 
unto him. Let him, in this supreme moment, 
discover whether these questions are fully and 
finally answered for him — for him on whom the 
darkness of Calvary is now gathering, for him 
who will soon cry amid the infinite blackness, 
" My God ! My God ! Why hast thou for- 
saken me?" That is Christ's thought, and he 
answers these questions with a sublime sincer- 
ity, a triumphant promptitude, a profound and 
most impressive conviction — " In my Father's 
house are many mansions : if it were not so, I 
would have told you." 

Do you say, " These questions are rarely 
asked, and are asked only by exceptional men 
and women in exceptional circumstances? " I 
do not think so. Sometimes, as we walk be- 
side the sea, we become suddenly conscious of 
a solemn momentary hush. The wind has 
dropped, the tide is full, the hoarse rush of the 
withdrawing waves is no longer heard, and for 
a moment or two the world seems filled and 
flooded with a great silence. So there are 
occasional moments in every life when the roar 
of the world is stilled, and in the stillness men 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 141 

begin to ask themselves the profound ques- 
tions for which life has hitherto left them no 
leisure. If such questions intrude themselves 
at no other time they must come when we are 
face to face with death for the first time, and 
see that which an hour ago was sentient and 
loving now become a thing that is inanimate 
and corrupt. But men do not wait till death 
to ask these questions. Listen to this, a cry 
as ancient as Socrates or Buddha, yet wrung from 
the soul of a young university student in one 
of our great cities, and sent me in a letter: 

" If a God exist, he wraps himself in dark- 
ness; if he exist, he folds himself in silence. 
Leaning as it were over the edge of being, men 
strive to pierce the abyss of the unknown ; 
above, below, they strain their sight, but they 
see nothing; they listen, but nothing strikes 
their ear ; weary, dizzy, they stagger backward, 
and with the darkness pressing on their eye- 
balls, murmur 'God.' " 

So also the eloquent Frenchman, Naville, to 
whom I have already alluded, cites a letter 
from a youth who describes himself walking 
up and down all night in the moonlight, 
reasoning out these thoughts for himself, until 
at last he feels the strife is over ; he sees his 
old, glad, simple life all vanishing, and slowly 
opening up the vision of his new life — somber, 



142 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

joyless, unpeopled — and he cries, " The agony 
of that hour was frightful ! " Do not I also 
know what that agony is, for have I not tasted 
this cup? And I do not doubt that in some 
way or manner beyond our thought Jesus tasted 
it also. In that long preparation for his work, 
of which we know absolutely nothing, in those 
thirty years of solitary growth in a town 
notorious for its wickedness, in that period 
which for all men is so full of temptation, he 
must have felt the deadly impact of these 
thoughts. Is it too presumptuous to picture 
the youthful Jesus in many a lonely night-walk 
beneath the moon of Palestine while the 
village slumbered at his feet, wrestling with 
these thoughts? Is there not some reminis- 
cence of a conquered past that breathes in 
these words? Did no earthly cloud roll be- 
tween the soul of Jesus and his Father ; no 
temptation of earth threaten for an instant that 
perfect communion, and teach him what the 
souls of men can suffer when they seem for- 
saken of God ? Yes ; he also has leaned out 
over the edge of being and murmured " God ! " 
He has faced the specters of the mind. He 
has exhausted every subtlety of thought with 
fearless sincerity, and now at the last he can 
say, " There is a God, for I live in him ; there 
is a future, for I have seen it ; there is an in- 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 143 

finite order in the universe, for it is my Father's 
house ; I am in the Father and the Father in 
me ; if it were not so, I would have told you.'' 
Here then is a teacher who, by the common 
consent of the highest intelligences of the 
world, is regarded as the divinest, the highest, 
the purest ; surely for us his word is worth 
something. For while it is true that we must 
fight out our own intellectual battles, it is also 
true that it is the work of great teachers to 
help us in the fight and lead us to victory ; or 
of what use are great teachers ? By every 
standard we may care to propose — and I speak 
now to those who would apply the most rigid 
and remorseless analysis to the story of Jesus — 
we must acknowledge Christ as likelier to find 
the solution of these problems than w r e are. Is 
it not then our wisdom to accept his verdict 
in humility ? " If it were not so, I would have 
told you ; " may we not rest somewhat on 
that ? Even if for the moment, in your whirl 
of troubled thought, you can grant no deity to 
Jesus, still is not his word worth some trust, 
has it not some authority? Can you not at 
least accept it as the word of a spiritual expert, 
of one who spoke from a fullness of divine 
knowledge such as no other has possessed ? 
For every day, in chemistry, in science, in 
mechanics, we have to receive and trust in 



144 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

verdicts which we have not worked out for our- 
selves, and we do so simply because we are 
fully assured that those who utter these verdicts 
are competent authorities. When Newton 
speaks to me on physics or Herschel on 
astronomy, I believe them ; is it not as reason- 
able to believe Jesus when he says, " If it were 
not so, I would have told you ? " Who like- 
lier to know than he? Who ever pierced 
deeper into the secrets of Deity than he ? 
Whose word may be more safely trusted than 
his? And you who doubt all things, who dis- 
believe equally in God and immortality, has 
it never occurred to you that it would be 
wise to doubt yourself also, and the wisdom of 
your own conclusions ? Might you not by 
pushing this process of doubt a little further 
succeed in doubting your own doubts away ? 
Are you quite sure that your own faculties are 
equal to the solution of these questions ? Does 
not science itself teach us that there are a 
thousand things lying beyond our vision, and 
not dreamed of in our philosophy, which are, 
nevertheless, real and near to us, and are re- 
vealed as man's instruments for detecting them 
become keener and more delicate ? We have 
had discovered to us rays beyond the solar 
spectrum which are invisible to us normally; 
we were ignorant of the ultra-violet rays until 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 145 

a chemical re-agent made them visible. May 
it not be at least as likely that but a slight ad- 
dition to our present powers of spiritual vision 
and understanding might reveal to us, beyond 
all doubt, so much of the glory of God as we 
could bear and live, and of the starry worlds 
that are his mansions? And if any ever had 
that added vision, if it be possible for us to 
conceive of any creature in the likeness of man 
who has trodden this earth, with the power of 
looking beyond it, and of piercing the mystery 
of the unseen, who so likely as Jesus? Who 
likelier to tell us the truth about ourselves, 
about the future, about God, and whose word 
can we more implicitly trust than his ? And it 
is the Christ who, by universal consent, did 
live the divinest life that earth has ever known, 
the Christ whose realization of God was so in- 
tense that he declared, " I and the Father are 
one ; whoso hath seen me hath seen the Father 
also ; " the Christ whom even his antagonists 
owned to be a teacher sent from God — it is 
this Christ who says with solemn emphasis, 
as he enters on the tragic close of life, " In my 
Father's house are many mansions : if it were 
not so, I would have told you." 

The fact is that we must find a center of au- 
thority somewhere if the fabric of religious 
truth is to be sustained. The private pope- 
10 



I46 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

dom of every man his own revelation is not 
workable, and is even ridiculously inadequate 
to the necessity. We must learn obedience 
and have some source of obedience, for obe- 
dience is the law of universal life ; even the 
boundless ocean, as it rolls and swells, moves 
within " the bonds of a boundless obedience. " 
Where is that center of authority to be found ? 
We have to choose between the individual 
reason, the Church, and Christ. The first is in- 
adequate because it works to no common end, 
it announces no common result, it is bounded 
on all sides by the inefficiencies of ignorance 
and prejudice. The second fails because it is 
cumbered with tradition ; it is a divided voice, 
and, like the reason, unites in no common ver- 
dict. We are driven, therefore, to the author- 
ity of the living Christ for refuge. We must 
take his word. We must find repose in his 
complete assurance. We reach and shudder at 
the least barrier of reason, and there we cry, 

41 Can a mere man do this ? 
Yet Christ saith this he lived and died to do. 
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, 
Or lost." 

We implore, " To whom should we go but 
unto thee ? Thou hast the words of eternal 
life." And he replies, out of the depth of his 
infinite calm, " There is no other. To this end 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 147 

was I born that I should bear witness unto the 
truth. If it were not so, I would have told 
you." 

As Jesus claimed for himself an absolute 
sincerity, so we claim it in his name. If it be 
not so, what have we to gain by saying that it 
is so ? What has any man to gain in the end 
by saying that the thing that is not is ? I 
know to whom I am speaking ; I know how 
commonly it is said that unbiased judgment 
cannot be expected from those who have a 
cause to maintain, and that in any case mere 
personal testimony is worthless. It is enough 
to point out that such a mode of argument is 
unworthy of an intelligent man, because it is 
not argument so much as insult ; it assumes 
that all Christians are either fools or knaves. 
For myself I deny the imputation. " If it were 
not so," if I were once honestly convinced that 
Christianity was not credible, I would acknowl- 
edge my error and endeavor to get through the 
world as best I could without a God. How- 
ever much I should lose in losing Christ, I 
should know well that I should gain more in 
gaining truth. But before I could do this I 
should have to get rid of more than mere per- 
sonal testimony — the testimony of Jesus him 
self, the testimony of the ages, and the living 
testimony to the sense of God which exists in 



I48 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

the souls of men to-day. There is a moral in- 
stinct within us which cleaves irresistibly to 
Jesus. We say, as James Smetham said, 
" This must be true. It is impossible that 
either fool or rascal could have invented the 
fourteenth of John or the twelfth of Romans. 
They are honest to the bone." No further 
voice counts for much when that profound in- 
ner voice has spoken. It is not the voice of 
the reason or the heart, or of any part of us 
taken separately ; it is the voice of our whole 
self speaking ; deep answering unto deep ; the 
soul replying to the soul's master, with the 
distinctness of a golden bell, " Rabbi, thou art 
the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel." 

And, surely, to the intelligent man there is 
an overwhelming force in human testimony, 
and must always be. To the sincere student 
there should be something quite as well worth 
investigation in this phenomenon of belief and 
conversion as in the stamen of a flower or the 
armor of a beetle. How is it that an incon- 
testable change does pass over men, turning 
the drunkard and the profligate, the embittered 
and hopeless man, into the pure-minded, 
kindly, and noble-natured man, who henceforth 
gives to the service of others the powers once 
squandered in the abuse of himself? How is 
it that for hundreds of years men have con- 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 1 49 

sistently described this change as the result of 
an impression of God received in the heart, an 
impression so vivid, so real, so overwhelming 
that it has literally changed the current of a 
life and made them new creatures in Christ Je- 
sus? It is at least unscientific and unphilo- 
sophic to ignore this testimony, and how much 
more foolish to ignore the testimony of the 
ages to God and immortality ! For this is the 
conclusion of one of the wisest men and no- 
blest thinkers of our time, Professor Max Miil- 
ler, in the last of a series of recent lectures de- 
livered before the University of Glasgow, a 
conclusion reached only after an exhaustive 
study of all the religions of the world from 
the earliest dawn of life : 

" We can now repeat the words which have 
been settled for us centuries ago, and which 
we learned by heart in childhood, ' I believe in 
God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth/ 
with a new feeling, with the conviction that 
they express not only the faith of the apostles 
or of ecumenical councils, but that they con- 
tain the confession of the faith of the whole 
world, expressed in different ways, conveyed 
in thousands of languages, but always embody- 
ing the same fundamental truth ; fundamental 
because founded on the very nature of our 
mind, our reason, and our language : That 



150 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

where there are children there must be a fa- 
ther, where there are acts there must be agents, 
and where there are many agents there must 
be a Prime Agent, whom man may know, if 
not in his own inscrutable nature, yet in his 
acts as revealed in nature." 

Thus do the ages witness to God. Genera- 
tion after generation has leaned out over that 
dizzy edge of being, but not without vision, 
not in utter darkness and forsakenness. For 
as they have strained outward into that 
mighty bosom of night something has flashed 
upon the eye, something has fallen on the ear; 
a heavenly warmth has touched them, a divine 
whisper has thrilled them, a silent love has em- 
braced them, and they have cried, " We believe 
in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of 
heaven and earth ; if it were not so, we would 
have told you ! " 

Out of this vision of God and immortality 
has sprung all fhat is noblest in human life and 
aspiration ; out of it to-day spring the largest 
thoughts, the noblest dreams, the saintliest 
purposes of men, purposes so strong and vital 
that we refuse to believe that the grave can 
terminate them. It is not the vision of God 
only, but of eternal life in God which has 
cheered men from the beginning. It is the 
Father's mansions as well as the Father. It 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 151 

is the place prepared for us as well as the state 
in which it is prepared. The vision has been 
narrowed and distorted, no doubt, but a nar- 
rowed vision is better than none, and the 
dream of a heaven never so material is better 
than the blank outlook where no star of hope 
burns amid the gloom. I had rather believe 
in the paradise of Mohammed than the un- 
waking oblivion of the agnostic. And the be- 
lief in God has been distorted too, and men 
have thought they saw the power, but not the 
pity ; they have seen the Sovereign, but not 
the Father. But here again even the narrow- 
est conception of God is better than none ; for 
to believe in God is the very sign and note 
and character of man. It is that belief which 
makes him man and lifts him above the brute. 
It is to the refuge of that belief that the torch 
of reason is meant to conduct him. Let us be 
thankful for even the most rudimentary faith 
in God and immortality. However crude or 
narrow or materialistic it may be, let us wel- 
come it as the evidence of a soul in man. 
There is no other force that can enable man to 
stand upright and undismayed beneath the 
silence of the starry spaces, and in the face of the 
immutability of nature and the havoc of death. 
But this force can. It is effectual in the worst 
crises of life. It is most triumphant when all 



152 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

things are against it. In all ages men have 
found it so. 

" For ever since from the portal 

Of chaos came forth man, 
The longing for life immortal 

Hath colored every plan. 

" Yes, life, new life, is ever 
The surety that nature shows, 

And to this one law forever 
The infinite system goes. 

41 So close up your ranks, my brothers, 
And with hearts too high to fail, 

Let us say * Farewell,' while the others 
On the other side cry, 4 Hail ! ' " 

Of that vision of Christ's — the universe as 
God's realm, in which are many mansions, or 
abiding-places ; a realm where each personal 
life finds its due place and adequate reward ; 
where none is forgotten or neglected, because 
it is not a governor or monarch onlywho pre- 
sides over the vast and peopled spaces, but a 
Father who is kind to the unthankful also — of 
that far-reaching, sublime, and comforting 
vision, I do not now speak. Its elements are 
the thought of God's variety of provision for 
his children, and of the individual soul as reach- 
ing the precise place or sphere which an eter- 
nal wisdom shall assign it. It is the sugges- 
tion of an infinite catholicity in God's arrange- 



THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 1 53 

ments ; not one mansion, but many ; not one 
general state or sphere, in which myriads of 
widely separated individualities are crowded, 
but a place for me, a place for you — the place 
for which we have fitted ourselves, and where 
we can best serve God. On all this I may but 
touch now ; but there is one other inevitable 
suggestion. 

" If it were not so," says Jesus, with divine 
candor and tenderness, " I would have told 
you." You say, perhaps not with candor, nor 
with tenderness, nor even with regret, " If it 
be not so," and you go your way in pride and 
denial. You turn from Christianity contemptu- 
ously, not knowing what it is you reject, and 
content to reject it upon the flimsiest of rea- 
sonings; and therefore to your If I oppose 
another ; I say, " What if it be true, after all ? " 
What if these sayings of Jesus are absolute 
and solemn truths? What if it be, indeed, 
true that we must all appear before the judg- 
ment-seat of Christ? What if this eternal 
Power we do not see watches us all the while 
— this God we deny is indeed he to whom we 
must render the account of the deeds done in 
the body? It is easy to say that Christianity 
may be false; it were wise to recollect that it 
may be true. And if it be true, if this little 
life be God's great opportunity bestowed on 



154 THE CANDOR OF CHRIST. 

us for serving him ; if, while we debate and 
question, the years rush by, and sweep us fast 
and faster to that white throne, where our 
wasted opportunities will gather to reproach 
us — O ! if all this be true, terribly true, liter- 
ally true, tragically true, for each of us, " How 
shall we escape, if we neglect so great salva- 
tion, which at the first began to be spoken by 
the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them 
that heard him ? M 



As we forgive our debtors. — Matt. vi y 12. 

The working classes are now demanding that Christianity 
should be tried by the test of its social effectiveness, its 
power to serve the welfare, physical, intellectual, moral, of 
the great mass of men. — Bishop Bar?y, 

We ought in this life to foster all that makes goodness 
easier and sets barriers of whatever kind across the flowery 
way of s\xi.^-Right Hon. W, E. Gladstone, 



VII. 

THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

This is the most difficult passage in the 
Lord's Prayer, the only passage on which 
Christ thought elucidation necessary, and 
which he reiterated and emphasized. If we 
took it in its literal sense it would be easy to 
say that it was the utterance of an impossible 
idealism, and that as a matter of fact it was 
never acted upon. 

The late Edward Fitzgerald did indeed once 
lend a friend ,£200, and when interest had 
been twice paid upon it said, " I think that 
will do/' and flung the note-of-hand into the 
fire. Shelley also forgave his debts, and when 
he had little or nothing for himself was perpet- 
ually busy in raising loans for his father-in-law 
— loans which were practically gifts. And 
these are instances, not of saints or apostles, 
but of two widely different men, one of whom 
had nothing to say on religion, and the other 
of whom attacked Christianity and rejected it. 
It is perhaps fair, therefore, to assume that 
there are many other cases which have 



158 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

never been recorded, and that the forgiveness 
of debts, in the literal sense, is commoner than 
we suppose. But at least it must be granted 
that it is neither the principle nor practice of 
society, and that of those innumerable millions 
who daily repeat the Lord's Prayer there is 
scarcely a percentage who assume that Jesus 
meant any thing in particular when he bade us 
pray, " Forgive us our debts as we forgive our 
debtors." 

But Christ never uttered unmeaning or su- 
perficial words, and therefore it is well for us 
to ask what he did mean. Least of all would 
he have spoken with impossible idealism in a 
prayer which he deliberately framed for the 
use of his disciples and followers through all 
the ages. Unless we are prepared to say that 
Christ was wrongly reported, or that he said 
what he did not mean and did not expect any 
body to accept as serious, we are bound to as- 
sume that Christ had a clear meaning and pur- 
pose in his speech, which it becomes us to 
discover ; for the practical impotence of pious 
ideals in regulating public conduct arises 
mainly from this very cause, that we perpetu- 
ally act as though Christ never said what he 
meant, and rarely meant what he said ; that 
he was a visionary, a glorious dreamer, a relig- 
ious rhapsodist. That, at least, was not his 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. I 59 

view of himself when he said his words were 
not his but the Father's who sent him, nor 
Paul's view when he claimed for Christ all the 
kingdoms of human action, and told those 
highest in pride and power of life that their 
Master also was in heaven. Let us, at least, 
be honest ; if we cannot be that the sooner 
we close our church doors and vacate our pul- 
pits the better. Let us, at least, free ourselves 
from the vitiating insincerity of an electicism 
which applauds Christ when he says things we 
like to hear, but disapproves and ignores him 
when he utters words which are trying to the 
temper or difficult to the understanding. Even 
though he were but a Jewish carpenter, who 
preached an impossible social reconstruction, 
he would at least deserve the respect which sin- 
cerity always demands ; and how much more 
when we worship him as the incarnation of 
Deity — the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

This phrase can only be explained, then, by 
reference to the first clause of the prayer it- 
self, " Our Father who art in heaven." The 
fatherhood of God was the central conception 
of Christ's thought, and colored every thing. 
It regulated his attitude to Jewish society, to 
the Mosaic' law, and to the world at large. 
Other religions recognized the majesty and 
justice of God; it was the work of Chris- 



160 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

tianity to reveal the fatherhood of God, In 
majesty and justice there is abundant room for 
condemnation and expiation, but none for ten- 
derness or comfort or forgiveness. From the 
majesty and justice of God the splendor and 
order of the world have sprung, this great 
world of exquisitely balanced law, which ful- 
fills itself without error or interruption, 
whether in the springing of a grass-blade, the 
coloring of an insect's wing, the outspread 
wonder of the starry firmament, or the secret 
potency of the ocean gulf-streams. But if God 
is not only law but love, then in human soci- 
ety there must be a place for love as well as 
law. A world of law alone would be a tor- 
ture-chamber of incessant • and immitigable 
cruelty to creatures who cannot only fear and 
obey, but who can weep and pray and love. 
If the world is the mirror of the majesty of 
God it is also the mirror of the love of him 
who is the Father in the heavens. So it fol- 
lows, then, that the world is not governed by 
law alone, but love, and you must leave a place 
for love also in human society. You who ask 
love from God must at least be prepared to 
show love to your fellow-man. If we ask to 
be forgiven our trespasses we ask something 
for which strict law makes no allowance, and 
we must not press for strict law — the utter- 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. l6l 

most farthing against our brother, while we 
expect God to forgive us our whole debt. In 
other words, if God's relation to us is a fa- 
therly relation, our relation to our fellows is 
both a fatherly and brotherly relation, and 
what we expect to receive we must be pre- 
pared to give. 

Now Christ come to explain, defend, and 
enforce three great rights of man. The first 
right was the right of life. He taught that 
man's presence on the earth was not an acci- 
dent, but the wise arrangement of an infinitely 
wise Father. That Father had been at infi- 
nite pains to care for the least things of his 
creation. He had woven a raiment for the lily 
more exquisite than the silk attire of kings, 
and had clothed the hills with grass, every 
blade of which surpassed in cunning workman- 
ship the most delicate and skillful work of 
man. Though a million sparrows fluttered 
their life out beneath the blue wide skies, yet 
he knew each as though fed from his hand ; 
and from the loneliest cleft of the loneliest rock 
of the wilderness he heard the young ravens 
when they cried for food. To the infinite 
there is neither great nor small, and if we can 
conceive of God as holding the stars in their 
places by the majesty of his power we can 
equally conceive of him as caring for the spar- 
11 



162 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

rows by the omniscience of love. The birds 
had a right to live out of the bounty of the 
earth, and if the birds, how much more had 
man ? Simplification was the great key-note 
of all Christ's social teaching. In the perfect 
society he sketched there would be no anxiety 
about the means of life, no fear of privation 
or covetousness of wealth, no Dives feasting 
from golden dishes while Lazarus mumbled 
his hard crust at his gates, no mean cares 
about to-morrow's bread for the toiler, and no 
still meaner cares of appetite or vanity for the 
opulent ; men would trust the fatherhood of 
God and be content, they would be conscious 
of their spiritual relationship to him, and 
would be delivered equally from anxiety and 
avarice. There was room enough for all as 
there was for the lilies, and food enough for all 
as there was for the sparrows and the ravens. 
If these had a right to live man had a yet 
greater, and if man could not live it was the 
fault of society, and not the fault of God. 
That was the first great human right which 
Christ expounded and asserted ; in the most 
literal sense of the words he came that man 
might have life, and have it more abundantly. 
The second great right which Christ asserted 
and expounded was the right of liberty. It 
was not liberty through the outrage of law, but 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 163 

liberty through obedience to the highest law. 
Man's recognition of the power of law, and his 
faculty of voluntary obedience to law, was the 
secret of his greatness. It was this which in- 
vested the humblest man with a certain dignity 
and grandeur — his life was the center of pro- 
found and tremendous consequences, his words 
were reported into the ears of God, and his 
whispers were trumpeted in thunder from the 
house-tops of eternity. Such a being could 
not be a slave unless he consented to his bond- 
age. There was that in him which no tyrant 
could subdue and no terror overwhelm : let 
him fear not them who killed the body but 
were impotent against the soul. The only real 
slavery was the slavish spirit, the only true 
liberty was liberty of the soul. That was the 
true hope of society — the emancipation of the 
soul of man from its corrupt maxims, and the 
overthrow of tyranny and wrong would fol- 
low. If society was so fashioned that evil 
seemed every-where triumphant, that was not 
the work of God nor the order of God, but 
was the result of the mischievous stupidity of 
man. For all social, as for all spiritual diffi- 
culties, the solution of Christ was absolutely 
simple — "ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free.' , 

The third great right which Christ taught 



164 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

was the right of brotherhood. In every word 
which Christ uttered that sublime truth was 
either stated or implied. Christ saw men in 
their essential moral nakedness, and stripped 
of the mere accidents of place it was obvious 
enough that mankind was one. Rich and poor, 
high and low, learned and ignorant, were unit- 
ed by things more precious than gold, and 
more enduring than learning, by the mystery 
of birth and the agony of dying, by the impar- 
tiality of pain and the catholicity of sorrow, 
and the meanest shared the thoughts of the 
highest, and the highest the passions of the 
meanest. No man can afford to loathe the 
leper, he knows not how soon he may be a 
leper ; no woman can afford to scorn the Mag- 
dalen, she knows not what fate awaits the 
child within her arms or the maiden whose 
smile makes sunshine in the house. Does thy 
brother ask thy cloak of thee ? He has a right 
to ask : give him thy coat also. Does he com- 
pel thee to go a mile? Go twain: he is thy 
brother. Prejudice has its claim on culture, 
suffering on happiness, poverty on wealth, for 
men are not isolated personalities, who can do 
as they like, but members of one body and 
members one of another. According to the 
teaching of Christ, the more a man helped his 
neighbor the better did he love God, for if a 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 165 

man did not love his brother, whom he had 
seen, how could he love 'God, whom he had 
not seen ? 

And to these three great primal rights Christ 
added another — not the right of happiness, 
which is the great gospel of the political 
economist, but the right of sacrifice. He 
taught that the highest glory of man is his 
power of sacrificing himself for another, and 
that there is no real nobility but at the price 
of sacrifice. Love is sacrifice, patriotism is 
sacrifice, holiness is sacrifice. Let the rich 
youth who would be perfect sell all his posses- 
sions and give to the poor, for character can- 
not be perfected without sacrifice. Let the 
man enervated by the sweet cup of prosper- 
ous days, and the bright wine of human love, 
leave father and mother, and houses and lands, 
and take up his cross and follow Christ. Let 
a man sacrifice his ambitions, his poor, mean, 
trivial, personal purposes, and fling himself in- 
to the world's life. 

"He only lives in the world's life 
Who hath renounced his own." 

There is no salvation for society but by the 
cross, no throne so high as Calvary, no crown 
so divine as the crown of thorns. Sacrifice is 
not a bitter necessity of life, but a splendid 



l66 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

right and privilege, for no other creature but 
man could conceive "the thought of dying for 
his fellow. Christ came to show us the way, 
to give his life a ransom for many, to ransom 
men from selfishness by the spirit of his cross, 
and teach them that the glory of mere per- 
sonal triumph is a mean and base, and even 
wicked, thing beside the glory of personal de- 
feat and downfall for the redemption of 
men. The satanic and sacrificial were the two 
poles of the ethics of Jesus, and he taught 
that men were satanic as they shunned sacri- 
fice, and divine as they endured it. 

Now, look at this phrase again in the light 
of these teachings, and you will see that what 
it means is this, that human society cannot ex- 
ist on the mere principles of political economy 
and bare justice — there must be a margin for 
love. It is not enough to be coldly just to 
your neighbor, you must learn to love your 
neighbor as yourself. God has not treated us 
on the principle of strict justice alone, and we 
know it. For why should he forgive us? Why 
should he promise eternal life to those who do 
his will during the brief space of earthly ac- 
tivity? On what principle of strict justice 
can you approve so vast a reward for so un- 
meritorious a service? Why should Lazarus 
be carried by the angels into Abraham's bo- 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 167 

som ? How can you justify a compensation so 
enormous for even such sorrows as Lazarus 
endured on earth? Why should you hope to 
get to heaven ? It is a consummation out of 
all proportion to anything you have ever done 
or can do. Be life never so hard with you, yet 
it must be owned that it is but a slight affliction 
to suffer in view of that eternal weight of 
glory for which you hope, and on no possible 
computation of fairness can such a recompense 
be justified. This is God's way of treating 
you ; the least you can do is to apply some- 
thing of the same treatment to your brother. 
Deal with his debt in the same proportion, use 
the same divine method of arithmetic, compute 
his claims with the same generosity: you, who 
hope for heaven and forgiveness, teach your 
brother what heaven means by your own char- 
ity, and w 7 hat forgiveness is by your own re- 
nunciation. For you will not be permitted, 
when the great accounts of the world are 
made up, to get every thing and give nothing; 
with what measure you mete it will be meas- 
ured to you again. 

See how this doctrine of the margin works 
in home life. The true angel of the home is 
not Justice, but Charity. You may collect a 
household, but you cannot build a home on 
mere justice. The best of us are constantly, 



l68 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

though unconsciously, unjust to each other in 
home life. So mysteriously are we made that 
those who live closest each other in the inti- 
macies of daily union often fail to comprehend 
each other, and the one often hurts and chafes 
the other. And because these attritions must 
be there is in the most perfect home a con- 
stant need for forgiveness. Conduct the home 
on the principles of mere justice, and see what 
comes of it. Do we not know homes where 
hungry hearts have been crying out for a little 
love through a life-time, where children grow 
up stunted in affection because love has been 
repressed, where the very air of strict justice 
has been so bitter and nipping an atmosphere 
that all that is best in life has withered under 
it, and where the child or mother would gladly 
barter all the gold of which justice has made 
them sharers for a single kiss which came from 
the soul, a mere breath of warmth from the 
strained lips of the emotions ? Such house- 
holds are simply a cruel travesty of all that 
home should mean. The home, as an institu- 
tion, could not exist a single day without the 
presence of that love which " beareth all things, 
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth 
all things." It ceases to be a home and be- 
comes a barrack when the forgiveness of love is 
unknown in it. And the same thing is true of 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 169 

society. The ideal society Christ preached 
was society as a family, and where that ideal is 
lost, where our brother man becomes to us a 
mere cipher in the sum of civilization, when 
we think it enough to pay him his wages and 
never think it our duty to give him also sympa- 
thy and love, then the world becomes nothing 
better than one huge barrack, where men merely 
eat and sleep, and which it would be an ad- 
vantage for the great majority at once to 
exchange for the privilege of a grave. 

Or see how it applies to business life. It is 
related of a great employer of labor, recently 
dead, who bore a character of untarnished 
probity, that he once had in his employ a man 
of great promise, who on one occasion acted 
on his own judgment, and did not carry out 
his strict instructions. He was instantly dis- 
missed. The man traveled two hundred miles 
to see his master and make his apology. 
" And of course you took him on again ? " 
said a friend. The reply was, " Do you take 
me for a fool?" There may of course be an 
explanation of the incident which we do not 
possess, but as the story stands I say that was a 
wicked and tyrannical act. It was perhaps 
strict justice, but it was untempered justice, 
and we can no more bear untempered justice 
than untempered light. Who are we that we 



I70 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

should deal with one another in this fashion ? 
Do we never make mistakes, that we are so 
quick and unsparing to avenge them in others? 
How dare we be hard with one another when we 
plead daily that God will not be hard with us? 
It may be that our brother owes us a debt of 
humiliation and penitence, but not the less we 
owe him a debt of charity. It may be that he 
has sinned against us, but we sin yet more 
grossly against him when we refuse to forgive 
him his offense. There must be give and take 
between master and servant, an elasticity in our 
relations to each other, a margin for love and 
mercy in our lives, or else our justice will become 
a vile burlesque of all that is fair and just, and we 
shall be like the unworthy servant who was 
forgiven ten thousand talents, and straightway 
cast his fellow-servant into prison because he 
owed him an hundred pence. When you are 
tempted to be inexorable to the man who 
owes you some paltry hundred pence it will 
be well for you to recollect the enormous 
debt which God has forgiven you. 

The teaching has a wider bearing than this. 
The margin for charity and mercy must be 
recollected in all our dealings where our fellows 
are concerned. As a matter of political econ- 
omy it may be a just thing that you should 
invest your money so as to earn the highest 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 171 

dividend, but have you a right to take that 
dividend and ask no questions as to how it is 
earned? Is it nothing to you that men and 
women of the same flesh and blood as your- 
self are toiling twelve and fifteen hours a day 
to earn that dividend which you receive with 
such wicked complacency? Does it matter 
nothing to shareholders in tramways that the 
life of the tramway conductor is an inhuman 
drudgery and cruelty of which savages might 
be ashamed? Does it matter nothing to the 
shareholders in railways that while the world 
feasts on its Christmas bounty a pointsman 
who has worked twenty hours without sleep 
staggers from his post and falls dead upon the 
line — dead of drudgery on Christmas day? 
Has the owner of property no responsibility 
for the kind of property he owns and for the 
well-being of his tenants? And can we bear 
with equanimity the terrible verdict of so calm 
an observer as Huxley, who has told us that 
in every element that makes life worth living 
a pagan life in a savage island is infinitely 
preferable to the dreadful indecencies of life in 
a London slum ? There can be but one answer 
to these questions in the minds of all men who 
think. We are bound to remember that in all 
these matters we are dealing not with mechan- 
isms but with men, with men who are our 



172 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

brethren and to whom we owe a debt of 
brotherly consideration. And so true is this 
that we may even have to inquire, when men 
in the literal sense owe us a debt, whether we 
have not done something to create the very 
debt they owe us. We may have done it by 
the system of violent competition in trade 
which we have set up, by our neglect of the 
souls and bodies of those who are socially below 
us, by our indifference to their needs and our 
callousness to their distress. When the drudge 
of society cannot pay us our legal claim it may 
be that we owe him far more than he owes us, 
for we have made him a drudge, and our 
wrong against him is greater than his wrong 
against us. Or, as Emerson has put it, the 
man who lays 

44 hands on another 
To coin his labor and sweat, 
He goes in pawn to his victim, 
For eternal years in debt." 

But that is just what men do not think about 
nor care to be reminded of. No ; the man 
who earns your dividend is not even called a 
man ; he is a " hand," he is an " employee," he 
is an unknown and nameless cipher in the sum 
of things, about whom we ask no questions be- 
cause it does not strike us that he is a sentient 
and suffering creature, whom we shall have to 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 1 73 

meet face to face at the last great audit before 
the judgment-seat of Christ. And because the 
natural claims of men are thus ignored our 
civilization has become more a reproach than 
a glory to us, and it is a Christian poet who 
has to say of a Christian country, 

"Alas! for the rarity 

Of Christian charity 

Under the sun." 

This doctrine of the necessary margin for 
charity in human affairs has its application also 
in the things of the State. All statesmen have 
to recognize the solidarity of society. The 
doctrine of selfish individualism, the right of 
the individual to freedom of contract and sale, 
unrestrained by any consideration of his rela- 
tion to others, is a purely devilish doctrine, and, 
as men begin to see, has wrought immense 
evil for the nations. We begin to see that the 
condition of the people is after all a more im- 
portant question even for the State than the 
freedom of the individual, and we are acting 
on it. We act upon it when we limit the 
hours of labor, when we inspect and restrain the 
drink-traffic, when we interfere between capital- 
ist and labor, as in the great dock strike, and in- 
sist that justice shall be done to the underpaid 
and patient toilers of society in their reason- 



174 TIIE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

able demands. We may be rebuked in such 
matters for a sentimental humanitarianism, but 
that is better than a callous barbarism. Tar- 
dily but surely statesmen are beginning to 
recognize the duty of sympathetic considera- 
tion for men as men ; in other words, the rights 
of human brotherhood. 

It may be that we may err on this side also, 
and the natural revulsion from selfish individ- 
ualism has produced in our day revolutionary 
socialism. In the keenness of their anguish 
over human suffering men may say many 
violent and bitter things, and make many im- 
practicable and even ridiculous proposals ; 
but it is at least honorable in them that they 
feel, and are not content to let the world slip 
down to the devil unhelped. They cannot 
speak more strongly than Christ spoke when 
he said that the Pharisees " devoured widow's' 
houses," or feel more strongly than he felt 
when he wept over the city because of the 
desolations which, like-an impending thunder- 
cloud, moved swiftly on her. But if we sym- 
pathize with the moral earnestness of such men 
we do not accept their doctrines, and it is 
necessary to add that the socialism of Jesus 
does not mean many things which they sup- 
pose it to mean. It certainly does not mean 
social equality, for if all were equal to-morrow 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 1 75 

in a year's time we should again have aristo- 
crats and democrats, profligates who had sold 
their inheritance, and shrewd men who had 
bought it ; men whose force of character had 
lifted them above their fellows, and men whose 
vacillation and imbecility had once more de- 
graded them into the helots of society. Nor 
does it mean that the expenditure of men is to 
be strictly limited to the barest necessaries of 
life, that there shall be no elegant furniture, no 
tapestries or pictures, nothing but the plainest 
and poorest surroundings for the man who 
would be the helper of society ; for that would 
mean not merely the abolition of the arts of 
civilization, but that whole trades and profes- 
sions would be paralyzed, and that a new and 
vaster wave of poverty and distress would in- 
undate the world. Nor does it even mean 
that the minister w T ho preaches the doctrine 
of Jesus to the Churches should be kept poor 
because his Master was poor — which is the 
only application of socialistic Christianity 
which many people seem capable of suggest- 
ing — for the minister is entitled to share the 
wealth of his people as well as their poverty, 
even as Jesus shared the luxury of the publi- 
can as well as the hospitality of the poor. 
And still less does it mean that the Church 
should become a commune, for that experi- 



1/6 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

merit tried once left the church at Jerusalem 
permanently impoverished, and for the people 
who boasted that there was none among them 
that lacked Paul had in later years to beg 
collections throughout the churches of Asia 
Minor. No ! What it means, all that it can 
mean, is that, whether you be rich or poor, 
you are the steward of God, and that all your 
gifts were given for service. You are in a 
world where a myriad homes are dark, be it 
yours to brighten them ; where hearts are 
heavy, be it yours to lighten them ; where men 
suffer, be it yours to console them ; where 
men are wronged and injured, be it yours to 
champion their cause and right them ; for 
without this interchange of charity and sym- 
pathy between man and man the world is 
nothing better for multitudes than one huge 
broiling hell, across whose thresholds of birth 
the words may be written, " Abandon hope all 
ye who enter here." 

And I think, lastly, that it cannot be doubted 
that the world is moving toward some huge 
social reconstruction. The air vibrates with 
the armed feet of change. Men are blindly 
conscious that the present social system is un- 
just, and are blindly feeling after something 
better. What have you to say to them ? You 
may ignore them, and then I think I can tell 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 1 77 

you what will happen. If men cannot get the 
socialism of Jesus they will get the socialism 
of the devil. If men are once convinced that 
modern Christianity is incapable of taking up 
the cross of men's social wrongs and evils 
they will look elsewhere for help, and what 
Christianity will not give they will try to take 
in wild agonies of social upheaval of blood and 
passion and revolt. The socialism of Jesus, so 
sweet, so sane, so simple, does not make us 
equal, but it makes us brothers. It does not 
say, "All that is thine is mine," but " All that 
is mine is thine." This socialism of Jesus, 
simple as it is, will give men all they want 
through the cultivation of human charity, 
sympathy, and brotherhood ; but if we refuse 
it, then men will go elsewhere for deliverance, 
and will accept the devil's socialism. And 
that is a socialism whose outward signs are 
bloody streets and flaming cities, the wisest 
heads spitted upon bayonets, the best results 
of civilization shattered into dust — a socialism 
of lust and blasphemy, of anarchy and hatred, 
the first article of whose creed is that there is 
no God, and that Christianity is an exploded 
fable. This has happened once in European 
history; it may happen again, and in the gen- 
eral overthrow not merely the thrones of Eu- 
rope may disappear, but the Church itself may 
12 



178 THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 

be swept away before the flaming tide of uni- 
versal hatred and contempt. 

It is for the Church herself to say whether 
that catastrophe shall happen, for it is in her 
power to prevent it. I therefore appeal to 
those who are beginning life to recollect that 
Christianity is a thing for common life, some- 
thing not meant to stimulate Sabbath emo- 
tions, but to shape week-day conduct ; not a 
delicate spirit to be housed in the seclusion of 
the church, but a robust and vigorous pres- 
ence to rule the heart and the mart, the 
'change, the shop, the household ; a Gospel 
for the street as well as for the sanctuary, and 
that it must determine .not only our relation 
toward God, but our relation toward man in 
every detail of daily life. Beware that subtle 
other-worldliness, which gives to the pleasures 
of hope the strength that should be given to the 
regeneration of the present. And I appeal to 
the women of the Church, to the wives and 
mothers, to those who will be the mothers of 
the future, to teach the children at your knee 
the true Christianity which expresses itself in 
human helpfulness rather than in creeds and 
dogmas, and in your own lives to cultivate that 
great power of sympathy which is your essen- 
tial glory, for the help of all the poor, lost, 
weary children of our confused humanity. 



THE SOCIALISM OF JESUS. 1 79 

By woman came the fall, by woman also 
comes the redemption ; the redemption of 
society, the purification of the home, the heal- 
ing influences of charity, the penetrating charm 
of love, which shall lead the world as in silken 
cords to the accomplishment of its duty to the 
fallen, the downtrodden, and the weak. The 
night is far spent, the day is at hand ; and it 
is with that vision of a better day before us 
that we pray not to be taken to the kingdom, 
but that the kingdom may come to us : " Thy 
kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth 
even as it is done in heaven." 



Is not this the carpenter's son? — Matt. xiii> 55. 
A friend of publicans and sinners. — Matt, xi, 19. 

Then Christ sought out an artisan, 
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man ; 
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 

These sat he in the midst of them, 
And as they drew back their garment's hem, 
For fear of defilement, u Lo ! here," said he, 
" The images ye have made of me." — Lowell. 



VIII. 
THE DEMOCRA TIC CHRIST 

WHEN shall we see the real Jesus ? When 
shall we understand that the Saviour, whose 
name is music to the world, was a common 
man, born of common people, living in a com- 
mon world, and that it was the will of God 
that his glory should be thus veiled from man, 
that men might learn that in the commonest 
life God may be incarnated ? It is because 
we have lost sight of this true humanity of 
Jesus that his life has faded into so unreal a 
thing to us. 

Nothing is more instructive in this respect 
than the course of religious art. It will be 
found that the artist's conception of Christ is 
always borne out of his conception of life. We 
have the poetic Christ of Dor6, the laboring 
Christ of Holman Hunt, the tragic Christ of 
Munkacszy, the awfully realistic Christ of 
Vereschagin — which is right ? All, and yet 
none. No one has yet painted the element of 
terror in Christ before which his disciples were 
amazed and afraid and his antagonists quailed ; 



y 



1 84 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

or of divine softness when he melted into pure 
tenderness at the grave of Lazarus ; or of ma- 
jestic renunciation when he turned from the 
crowd who clamored for a king, and withdrew 
into the mountain and the desert solitude; 
neither these things nor the ineffable gracious- 
ness that clothed him, the charm that drew 
the multitude, the spiritual glory which turned 
wonder into worship and friendship into awe. 
One man alone, so far as my knowledge goes, 
has succeeded in giving us the purely human 
Christ, who nevertheless is felt by us to be es- 
sentially divine, and that man is Fra Angelica. 
It is in the simplest of frescoes, over a door in 
a forgotten corner of the cloisters of San 
Marco, at Florence, that the face of this Christ, 
who was the friend of men, meets us. It is 
not the man of sorrows ; on that radiant face 
is no trace of tears or the wasting of immedica- 
ble grief. It is a face that glows with the 
bloom of young manhood and the joy of perfect 
happiness. It is an immortal youth, with deli- 
cately tinted cheeks and joyous eyes, with the 
virility of youth in the supple figure, the hope 
of youth in the smiling, parted lips. There is 
no attempt to suggest the divine, unless it be 
in the more than human grace and joyous 
radiance of the face itself. It is precisely the 
human friend who might be met upon the 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 1 85 

common roads of life ; wise, strong, and gra- 
cious, who commands but does not awe us, 
who attracts „but does not overwhelm us; in 
whom the human heart beats with wholesome 
vigor, and whose serenity arises from the per- 
fect equipoise and unimpeded completeness of 
his own nature. It is the man who is divine, 
not by the miraculous addition of divine at- 
tributes, but by carrying the ordinary elements 
of humanity to a point of development and 
harmony in itself miraculous. This is the 
friendly Christ of Fra Angelica; this is the 
actual presence of him who was the friend of 
publicans and sinners. 

Let us measure these two terms by which 
Christ is described in these passages. They 
are both terms of contempt — the one of his 
condition, the other of his conduct. The Car- 
penter's Son stood manifestly upon the side 
of the vast toiling classes, and perhaps his 
power over the multitude was due in part to 
the fact that he was not a Pharisee or rabbi, 
but a child of the people. It is clear that he 
was recognized as a man of the people. He 
himself, on every possible occasion, was found 
upon the side of the people as against their 
rulers. He was the true friend of democracy ; 
and the net result of his teaching was their 
social emancipation. He redeemed, in his own 



1 86 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

person, labor from the dishonor which a false 
and wicked state of society had attached to it. 
He makes the worker of whatever grade the 
true aristocrat, and idleness and selfishness the 
unpardonable sins against society. He de- 
stroys the mischievous delusion that the high- 
est state of man is to sit with folded hands in 
splendid sloth or ride with glittering pomp in 
martial glory ; he asserts that the life that is 
not helpful is hateful. He lifts the humblest 
toiler from the shame into which society had 
thrust him and clothes him w r ith dignity and 
power. He asserts the moral might of meek- 
ness and the true glory of humility ; his beati- 
tudes are all pronounced on the virtues which 
no one covets, and his rebuke — surely the 
strangest woe ever uttered — on that which men 
most vehemently desire, that they may so far 
succeed in life that all men shall speak well of 
them. 

The term " friend of publicans and sinners " 
was even more purely contemptuous than the 
other, but if it be a reproach it is the most 
splendid ever uttered by human lips. It means 
that Christ had inaugurated a divine departure 
in the world of morals ; he inaugurates the new 
religion of pity. He who has the best right to 
condemn the sinful woman does not condemn ; 
he who is the purest does not shrink from the 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 1 87 

presence of impurity ; he who is the greatest 
preacher of his time does not shut himself up 
in jealous isolation as did John, but dines with 
publicans and sinners. He comes eating arid 
drinking; a pure, genial humanity stretching 
out friendly hands to all the friendless. From 
his childhood this genial grace had distin- 
guished him. He grew in favor with God and 
man. God blessed him, and people liked him. 
He now bestows his friendship where it is most 
needed. He is on the side of the wronged, the 
fallen, the guilty, the victims of Pharisaism, 
hypocrisy, greed, and passion ; those wounded 
by the bitterness of social ostracism, trampled 
by the malice of social injustice, scorned by a 
purity that has no pity, and a sanctity that has 
no sympathy, and a piety that has no inspira- 
tion. He is their champion and Redeemer, 
" the friend of publicans and sinners. " 

By these two verses, then, we can under- 
stand, almost better than by any others, the 
meaning of Christ in history, and we can meas- 
ure the revolutionary force of Christianity. It 
is difficult to use the right words to express 
what this means, because we are hampered by 
the evil associations of the words we are forced 
to use. We cannot speak of communism with- 
out suggestions of blood and anarchy, or so- 
cialism without remembering the propaganda 



1 88 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

of conspiracy and spoliation to which its name 
has been given, or revolution without a faint 
shudder at the vision of brutal brows and 
bloody scaffolds which history suggests. Yet 
nothing is more clear and distinct than the 
solemn announcement of Jesus Christ that his 
coming is the tocsin-bell of world-wide revolu- 
tion. He came not to bring peace, but a 
sword ; to sow the seeds of variance in homes, 
communities, and nations ; to begin that vast 
Armageddon which will never end till every 
tyranny is broken, every wrong avenged, and 
every evil thing swept into the outer darkness. 
All history culminates in him, and from his 
coming a new era commenced, a truth tacitly 
inwoven in the very chronology of Christen- 
dom, which divides the centuries by the birth 
of Christ, and begins to reckon time afresh 
with its solemn Anno Domini. 

Now, Christ came to create a new society, a 
new world. He had his Utopia, as it has been 
well said. What was Christ's Utopia? What 
does Christ authorize us to expect, what not 
to expect ? 

In the first place, it is necessary to repeat 
. that Christ does not authorize us to expect 
happiness. What is happiness ? It is a state 
of mind arising solely from ephemeral and ex- 
terior conditions. It is a matter of moods, of 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 1 89 

money, of health, of success, of food, of light, 
of clothing. Even in what seem its securest 
forms it fades with waning youth or failing 
fortunes or breaking health, with the wail of 
shattered love or the requiem over open graves. 
It is built on circumstance, and changes With 
the ebb and flow of circumstance. It is more 
inconstant than the wind, more changeful than 
the color of the sea or the rapid transforma- 
tions of an April sky. But this is what men 
have sought from the world's beginning with 
an almost frantic quest and passionate thirst. 
This is what every statesman promises the 
crowd, and what the crowd perpetually desires. 
Civilization is the result of the thirst for hap- 
piness. It proceeds, as I have said, on the as- 
sumption that the better fed and better clothed 
and better housed a man is the happier is he. 
It assumes that happiness is the end of life, 
the one great and all-sufficing aim worth living 
for. And O, if this be so, what a tragedy is 
human life ! What an irony is civilization ! 
For how many are happy ? Who gets what 
he wants, or, getting it, is satisfied ? Where is 
the man who has found wealth the source of 
happiness or plenty the secret of peace? And 
if these who do obey the axioms of the world 
and succeed in getting the coveted rew r ards of 
life are still unhappy, what of those who never 



I90 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

get them ? What of the famished poor, whose 
life is one long drudgery — the lives that know 
neither fullness of bread nor fullness of love, 
the hearts and bodies that waste uncomforted 
and perish unregarded ? Yet so certain are 
men that happiness is the end of life that even 
the Declaration of American Independence de- 
clares in its preamble that one of the " inalien- 
able human rights " is the " pursuit of happi- 
ness.' ' O, that is where all our social schemes 
fail ; we seek to make men happy instead of 
seeking to make them good. Christ has once 
and for all exploded the fallacy that exterior 
conditions can necessarily develop the soul's 
growth and peace in the two terrific parables 
of Dives and Lazarus and the rich fool. 
And he has also summed up the whole matter 
in one tremendous sentence, which seems to 
burn its way like a shaft of lightning right into 
the most secret places of our thought, when he 
asks, " What shall it profit a man if he gain 
the whole world, and lose his own soul?" 

It is significant that once only does Christ 
use the word, and then he says that men are 
" happy " if they know his commandments and 
do them. Thrice only do his apostles use the 
word, and then it is to assure us that we 
should be " happy " when we suffer for Christ, 
when we bear reproach for him, when we en- 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 191 

dure in his name. Another word was ever on 
his lips — blessedness. He taught that the 
mind was its own place, the heaven or hell of 
men ; that the kingdom of God is within us or 
nowhere. He gave us a spell by which we be- 
come indifferent to circumstance. He has 
taught men to use ic ever since, and to declare, 
as a man of our generation whose life was out- 
wardly a failure, declares: " When Job said, 
' Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him/ 
no wealth could enrich him after that. He 
had reached his climax. ,, Christ said that he 
came not to be ministered unto, but to min- 
ister. " To be ministered unto ; M that is the 
final exposition of happiness : to feed delicately 
and sleep softly, and be sheltered from rough 
winds and ill sights; to lay man and nature 
under contribution for our personal delight, to 
set a thousand weary feet running our errands, 
and have a thousand weary backs bowed to 
win us wealth ; to build our palace of ease in 
its garden of roses, careless of the wasted 
hands that beat against its golden gates, or 
the pollution that is splashed against its walls — 
that is the price at which happiness is 
bought. Christ came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister, to put his hand upon 
the aching sore and close it, to be servant of 
all, to stoop as low as man can sink, to shun 



I92 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

no risk, no pollution, no hardship, no agony, 
if by any means he could save some. He was 
the friend of publicans and sinners, and was 
blessed in their friendship. 

Christ's Utopia, again, does not promise us a 
remedy for human ills by the abolition of 
either labor or poverty ; that were as vain a 
dream as the pursuit of happiness. As regards 
labor, no true man would desire its abolition. 
The social paradise of such writers as Edward 
Bellamy is a little better than a strictly regu- 
lated hell. It turns the world into one vast 
prison-house. It is a state in which only the 
brainless could be content. Labor and pur- 
pose are the music of life, the salt of health, 
the springs of purity. If any thing be taught 
us by the Carpenter's Son it is the dignity and 
perenni'al nobleness of honest labor. The low- 
liest toil is a diviner thing than the most 
luxurious idleness; nor is poverty without its- 
compensations. Lazarus hears angels' music 
as he sleeps upon his pallet of rags, and is 
borne by angels into Abraham's bosom. To 
be poor is no sin : none was ever poorer than 
the Christ, and poverty may be made to yield 
infinite blessings. Christ recognizes that 
society must divide itself into grades, and he 
will render unto Caesar the things which are 
Caesar's. It is only the blind and ignorant 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. I93 

who can invent no better way of remedying 
social inequalities than by the spoliation of 
the rich and the enrichment of the spoiler. 
There is Lazarus at the gate, but you will not 
redress his wrongs by burning the palace of 
contemptuous Dives. You will redress them 
if you can make Dives the friend of publicans 
and sinners — if you can make him feel the 
divine force of brotherhood, that the man at the 
gate has a claim upon him, and that God made 
them both, and is no respecter of persons. There 
is not, and cannot be, equality, for Lazarus is 
a leper and Dives is not ; Lazarus is dying, 
and Dives has yet many days to live ; Laz- 
arus has a soul within him, but Dives has 
drowned his in sloth and gluttony, and is really 
poorer than Lazarus. There is not equality, 
and cannot be ; for golden chalices and heaped- 
up silver, silken raiment and beds of down, 
cannot cure the pain of those dreadful sores. 
No ; the only true equality comes not by 
change of state, but by change of heart. 
When the divine doctrine of human brother- 
hood is learned, when the divine friendliness of 
Jesus is practiced, then the middle wall of 
partition between rich and poor will be broken 
down, and Dives will save his soul by dividing 
his wealth, and Lazarus will be healed of a 
sorer pain than any bodily, even the isolation 
13 



194 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

of a poverty for which no man cares, and a 
suffering which only angels pity. Equality 
comes of itself, and in its only possible form, 
by the recognition of human brotherhood, 
when we recollect that " All ^e are brethren, ,■"' 
and one is our Master, even Christ." 

At this point, even at the risk of misconcep- 
tion, it is necessary to affirm what has been 
called the inwardness of Jesus. It cannot be 
claimed that Christ ever troubled himself much 
about the outside of things. It was not be- 
cause he was indifferent to them, but because 
he saw that they could only be changed from 
the inside. It is a mistake to claim Christ as 
a social reformer in the usual sense of the 
words. He was as little a social as a political 
reformer. He offered no panacea to a diseased 
society; he offers none still. To selfishness 
he uttered one pregnant word, " Ye must be 
born again ; " to poverty, " The kingdom of 
God is within you." The whole force of his 
teaching was to make men sublimely indiffer- 
ent to the purely external conditions of their 
life. He aimed at a higher point ; he taught 
the drudge he had a soul, the child of want 
that he was a child of God, the publican and 
harlot that they might be changed and en- 
nobled from within. His Spirit infected his 
disciples w r ith a noble contempt for what we 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. I95 

call the good things of life. It worked out in 
them a new nature which held the world lightly, 
as it was afterward to work out among the 
lowliest classes of society, in many a great 
city, a spirit of sublime content ; as it worked 
among the Puritans a vivid sense of the reality 
of eternal things alone, and has begotten in 
modern missionaries an heroic renunciation of 
the world. The one saving clause in such a 
statement is, that while he communicated the 
secret of a profound equanimity to his follow- 
ers in regard to their own secular environments, 
his Spirit was destined to create in them an 
equally profound sympathy with the sorrows 
of others. 

If, then, Christ does not authorize us to ex- 
pect either happiness or equality, if it be ad- 
mitted that he busied himself little with the 
outside condition of things, what, then, does 
he authorize us to expect ? What are the ele- 
ments of his Utopia? 

Simple and inefficient as the answer may 
seem, yet the great element is that divine 
friendliness which made him the helper of the 
publican and sinner. For that divine friendli- 
ness meant, in its essence, the rights of human- 
ity as humanity. To judge the revolutionary 
force of Christ aright we have not only to re- 
count his words, but to estimate the spirit and 



196 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

intention of his life, with the constant re- 
incarnation of that spirit in the lives of others. 
We cannot, for example, find a single word 
which he said about chivalry or slavery or 
many kindred topics. Perhaps not ; but what 
did it mean that in a time of the deepest so- 
cial darkness, when patriotism was quenched 
and military glory supreme, when one half the 
world was mortgaged to the other half, when 
the most rigid caste separated class from class 
throughout the world, that a working-man 
should come from Nazareth, and by the force 
of his teaching draw into an actual brother- 
hood all sorts and conditions of men ? It 
meant the abolition of caste, it was the por- 
tent of a great liberty. Behind him came the 
dawn, the morning of a new social era, and 
with the invisible weapons of his words he 
shattered the whole fabric of a corrupt and 
tyrannical society. We could almost imagine 
that, throughout the dungeons of the world, 
every chain shook and slackened when he 
came out of Nazareth, preaching liberty to the 
captive, and every slave felt the thrill of a new 
hope when he preached deliverance to them 
that we**e bound. He abolished slavery from 
the inside ; its germ was killed when the dem- 
ocratic doctrine of Christianity overspread the 
Roman Empire. True, it took centuries to 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 1 97 

die; it retreated from land to land. But ever 
as the leaven of Christ's spirit worked the bit- 
ter wrong of slavery was felt ; and if to-day 
slavery has ceased to exist it is the democratic 
influence of Christianity which has abolished it. 
Or what did it mean, again, that, in a day 
when Roman law gave the parent a complete 
right over his child, so that the child had prac- 
tically no rights, Christ should put a little 
child into the midst of his disciples and make 
the child the type of his teaching, the symbol 
of his kingdom ? It was the assertion of the 
dignity of the little child, of the claim of frailty, 
of the honor that men should pay to inno- 
cence ; and it meant a new era for children. 
Or what did it mean that holy women accom- 
panied Christ upon his ministry, that fallen 
women found in him a friend, that they were 
at the cross to wrap the body in fragrant spices, 
and early at the sepulcher to weep upon the 
Easter dawn; that it was a woman to whom 
Christ first appeared, that women were in the 
earliest councils of the Church, that they were 
among its most unselfish servants, and the first 
to claim the prize of martyrdom ? It meant a 
new era for woman — her true emancipation, 
and the birth of all that we call chivalry. It 
freed her sympathy, it invested her with sacred- 
ness, it has made her for many centuries now 



1 98 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

the light of the home, the minister of purity, 
the consoler of suffering, the helpmeet of man, 
the purifier of society, the benign custodian of 
virtue. Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightin- 
gale are the direct fruit of the cross of Christ ; 
without Christ such lives were impossible. The 
era of humanity began with the Working-man 
of Nazareth. 

That which the friendliness of Jesus Christ 
f really meant, then, was the sense of the indi- 
\ vidual worth of men and women. For him 
there was nothing common or unclean in hu- 
manity. However low it had sunk, it could be 
raised, and to save it was worth dying for. It 
was that individual worth of men and women 
which was forgotten in Christ's day, and is in 
ours also; it was that which he remembered 
when he suffered the woman who was a sinner 
to touch him, and told the story of the good 
Samaritan. I do not say that it was wholly 
forgotten then, still less that it is wholly for- 
gotten now. If the world is as sweet as it is, 
if it is not yet a hell, it is because that truth 
has been pressed home on men. And it is 
Christ who has made the world conscious of 
this truth and has given us all the salt which 
saves civilization from corruption." To see a 
man or woman as a soul, as a living spirit made 
by God, as something immeasurably higher 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. I99 

than all created things, is to see a very great 
and very awful thing. It is like looking on 
God himself; it thrills and solemnizes us. It 
was thus Christ looked on men and women, 
even though publicans and sinners ; it is thus 
he taught his disciples to regard them — so 
that it is more than a noble touch of poetry — 
it is a profound truth, which that true poet, 
Mr. Myers, states, when he makes St. Paul 
say: 

"Only like souls I see the folk thereunder, 
Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings ; 
Hearing their one hope, with an empty wonder, 
Sadly contented in a show of things." 

To see that vision is to master at a glance the 
science of altruism ; it is to make us ready to 
be offered up if we can redeem others. That 
was how the heart of Christ beat toward the 
publican and the sinner; and the perfect ex- 
planation of what Christianity means is in the 
Christ of whom Paschal says with noble truth, 
that whereas Mohammed founded his kingdom 
by killing, Christ did so by suffering himself to 
be killed. Do we share these feelings? Are 
our hearts the Bethlehems of the new incarna- 
tion of the Son of God, so that the Christ who 
is born again in our hearts lives again in us, 
and through our kindly hands, our anointed 
lips, our serviceable lives, his life streams out 



200 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

again upon the world in love and healing? That 
is the scheme for our own salvation and that of 
society with which he presents us. We must 
suffer with him if we would reign with him ; 
our selfishness, our egoism, our exclusiveness, 
our callousness to suffering which is not per- 
sonal, our hardness to sinners, all this must 
die, and be crucified with him, before the day 
of the w r orld's redemption draweth nigh. 

How, then, do these principles apply them- 
selves to us and to our own times? They un- 
mistakably suggest the question of what 
churches are for, and what is the Church ? 
Christ was the friend of publicans and sinners; 
the Church, if it represent Christ, then, 
is the friend of the friendless, the asylum of 
the hopeless, the haven of the unhappy. 
Every separate community which calls itself a 
church is a segment of the kingdom of Jesus, 
a sample by which we measure the w r hole, an 
object-lesson of what he means to make of 
the whole earth when his work is finished. 
The Church is the manufactory of character. 
Wherever we see the church-spire soaring 
above the homes of men we have a right to 
say, " That is a type of the skyward aim of 
Christianity; beneath that roof character is 
being made ; the people who assemble there 
are the present-day incarnations of the mind 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 201 

of Christ." It is no less a burden than this 
that Christ lays upon his Church. He describes 
himself as the vine and his disciples as the 
branches through whom the vital sap flows ; 
his disciples describe the Church as the body, 
of which he is the head. He bids us be per- 
fect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. 
It is true we cannot be perfect in the same way 
or degree ; but in perfection there is neither 
high nor low, great nor small. The grass- 
blade is as perfect a thing as the royal oak be- 
neath which it grows ; the lily of the field is as 
exquisite a creation as the noble flower that 
blossoms once in a decade ; the drop of water 
is as perfect in its own completion as the star 
which it reflects. Within our natural limita- 
tions we are to be Christs to this sinful world. 
The Church is to be the multiform incarna- 
tion of Him who was the friend of publicans 
and sinners. 

It follows, then, that if the Church is the 
incarnation of Christ it will be animated by 
his infinite friendliness ; the Church will exist 
for the people, not the people for the Church. 
Suppose, if you can, some entirely uninformed 
person arriving in this country and asking in 
all simplicity what are these buildings we call 
churches? "The prison," says he, " I can un- 
derstand, that is for criminals; the hospital, 



202 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

that is for the sick ; the school, that is for 
the young; but what is the church for? It 
represents a great deal of money ; it seems a 
pleasant place for any one who cares for music 
or oratory — when you can get them ; it ap- 
pears to afford a very comfortable way of 
spending an hour or two, and its occupants 
look by no means unhappy, ill-paid, or out-of- 
elbows. But all that can be said of a theater, 
a lecture-hall, a concert-room. What, then, 
differentiates a church from these ? M In many 
cases it would be impossible to return any very 
intelligible answer. Look at the modern church 
and compare it with the democratic Christ. Is it 
democratic? Does it seek to be the friend of 
the friendless? Is it not true that in all great 
cities the tendency is to leave the crowded 
neighborhoods of the poor and to follow the 
comfortable and wealthy classes " up town," 
and there to erect comfortable conventicles for 
their convenience, while the publican and sin- 
ner are forgotten ? Do the rich and poor really 
meet together in God's house? Is it not our 
modern method to have one church for the 
rich and another for the poor? " Little Beth- 
el " is our to A ocommon embodiment of the 
Christian Church. In Little Bethel the demo- 
cratic Christ has no place. The religion of Lit- 
tle Bethel is by far the most numerous of relig- 






THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 203 

ions, and it has never taken any account of that 
vast entity " the common people." It is a relig- 
ion of narrow, priggish, ignorant, other-world- 
liness — except on week-days. It consists of 
knots of men who think that churches exist for 
them, for the display of their talents, their am- 
bition, their social prejudices, their greed of 
power. Little Bethel knows nothing about 
publicans and sinners, and does not want to 
know. It sits upon its money-bags, and, as 
long as pews are let and finances prosper, does 
not care who comes or goes. It stubbornly 
refuses to adapt itself to the problems it ought 
to solve. It does not ask what the people 
need, but what the people ought to like, and 
acts accordingly. It acts accordingly, and 
with the result that in most great cities the 
central churches wear an air of squalid bank- 
ruptcy. They are forlorn and deserted, and, 
with a larger population round them than ever 
they had, have no one within their walls. The 
infinite friendliness of the democratic Christ it 
has never so much as dreamed of. 

It is strange, it is lamentable, how all re-7 
ligion seems to have an inherent trend toward 
Pharisaism. It almost seems as if with the 
building of churches, the establishment of 
regular and reputable services, the tide of 
prosperity which comes with public confidence, 



204 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

the very spirit of religion is apt to exhale and 
vanish. The note which Christ struck, and 
which it is for us continually to reproduce, is 
not Pharisaism, but friendliness. If Christ 
was specially the friend of publicans and sin- 
ners, the first friendship of the Church must 
be for these. It is these who ought to be 
found within every church. The Church 
should be the friend of labor, the friend of the 
disreptuable, the friend of all lonely, soiled, 
insignificant, unfriended, and unconsidered 
people. It should be the haven of the doubt- 
ful, the discouraged, the tempted, the mis- 
erable, the outcast, and if these are not 
attracted to it that church is a failure. 
It may have money, but it has not Christ. 
It may have highly reputable officers, but 
it has not the Holy Ghost. It may be a 
most elegant Little Bethel, with a most select 
assortment of most reputable souls in it, but 
it is assuredly not the incarnation of the demo- 
cratic Christ. It is the temple of modern 
Pharisaism, not the friendly asylum of hope, 
comfort, and redemption which he designed. 
" What man shall there be among you," says 
Christ, " that shall have one sheep, and if it 
fall into a pit on the Sabbath-day, will he not 
lay hold of it and lift it out ? How much, 
then, is a man better than a sheep ? " The 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 20$ 

implication is that we care more for sheep than 
men, more for respectability than the salvation 
of men. Our chief beatitude is, " Be respect- 
able, and you will die respected/' A sheep 
has a value and is worth care ; but there are 
so many of us, and human flesh is so cheap, 
and the publican so unpleasant a person, that 
for men and for the one man we care nothing. 
And men lie in deep pits all around us — in 
pits of ignorance and defilement and loveless- 
ness, of dullness, of hopeless drudgery; and if 
we do not lift them out, even at the expense 
of respectability, we do not fulfill the spirit of 
Christ. These are the people who most want 
a friend. Christ says, " I will be friends with 
you." He comes with joyous alacrity and 
pulls them out of the pit, and seeks to brighten 
their dull souls with hope, and any agency 
which lifts men out of pits, which brings them 
into moral, intellectual, or spiritual daylight, 
is doing the work of Christ, and is really a 
segment of his Church. 

But it is with much more than the interior 
spirit of churches that we are concerned. The 
Church is set in the world as a governing and 
leading force through which the whole earth 
is to be redeemed. If it be the incarnation of 
the democratic Christ it will powerfully affect 
the civil, commercial, and political life of na- 



206 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

tions. It will set a higher type and make that 
type respected. Is the type of business mo- 
rality so very much better within the Church 
than without it? Is the average Christian 
man so much better a citizen than the unbe- 
liever? We can, of course, think of many in- 
dividual instances, but the question must be 
answered in a different way. We must re- 
member that the Church has had centuries in 
which to produce this impression on the world, 
and then we must ask, What are the conditions 
of life in countries called Christian, and how 
far do they incorporate the spirit of Jesus ? 
I can only reply that the social conditions of 
life to-day in countries called Christian are in 
themselves the most crushing reproach which 
can fall upon the Church of Him who was the 
child of labor and the friend of publicans and 
sinners. What, for example, is the avowed 
principle of business life? It is ungoverned 
competition, with a view to the accumulation 
of rapid wealth ; and what would Christ have 
said to such a principle ? Broadly speaking, it 
means buying in the cheapest market and sell- 
ing in the dearest, which, within certain hon- 
orable limitations, may be a useful axiom of 
trade, no doubt. But it means much more 
than this in practice. It means underselling 
your neighbor and choking him off the market 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 207 

to enrich yourself; it means the unscrupulous 
creation of rings and corners which bring want 
and famine to thousands of homes that an in- 
dividual may be enriched ; it means grinding 
the poor and pushing the workwomen into 
vice ; it means a supreme carelessness of how 
others live, if only you can snatch an added 
morsel for yourself out of the vile scramble 
for food. It means that every trade is over- 
stocked, that the principle of every man speak- 
ing truth with his neighbor is practically sus- 
pended in business, that tradesmen stoop to 
lure the public to their shops by shame- 
ful tricks, and that the public are demor- 
alized by a wicked cheapness, and never 
conceive it to be a moral duty to give a fair 
price for a good article. And it means, also, 
that you do not get a good article even when 
you pay a fair price; that workmen have no 
honest pride in their work, and masters find 
that the workman's supreme aim is to do as 
little as he can for the largest wages he can de- 
mand ; that weary eyes have pored themselves 
blind over the clothes we buy, that your babes 
are clothed in garments which have been 
washed w r ith the tears of shame, and that the 
reek of death and the smell of the fire of hu- 
man anguish cleaves to the goods we buy so 
cheap, and will not buy otherwise than cheap. 



208 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

It is a foul and inhuman state of things, a new 
slavery not less shocking than the old, for, 
save that our white slaves have the liberty to 
cut their throats or drown themselves without 
inflicting loss on their masters, it is hard to see 
how they are better off than the Negro knocked 
down to the highest bidder or whipped to 
death in the cotton fields. If the Friend of 
publicans and sinners spoke to-day would he 
not point to many a man of business who sits 
to-day in church and is honored in the Church, 
and say, " Ye are they who for a pretense make 
long prayers — and devour widows' houses. Ye 
hypocrites ; how can ye escape the damnation 
of hell?" 

Or look, again, at modern life in relation to 
the actually outcast. We know the sense in 
which Christ used the word "sinner" of a 
woman. We know that the woman who is a 
sinner is still with us, and probably one mid- 
night spent in the streets of London could 
show us more of this uttermost degradation 
of humanity than Jesus saw in his whole 
ministry in Jerusalem. We cannot go home 
to our happy children but that worn, hol- 
low face will show itself like a dead face, 
tossed up into sight a moment on the insolent 
waves of our city life. We shall see it ; shall 
we think of all it means? Shall we picture it 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 20g 

as it once was, dimpled with innocent laughter, 
angelic in innocent sleep ? Shall we read the 
tragedy written in those sharpened features, 
the anguish shuddering through the false 
gayety out of those tired eyes ? Such a woman 
came to Jesus Christ. Those lips, soiled with 
corruption, kissed him. Those eyes that had 
seen so many evil sights shed penitent tears 
upon his feet. Do we ever permit such to 
come near us? Does the Church make any 
real, organized, and strenuous effort to save 
them ? Do we not take their presence as a 
matter of course? We do not mean to be 
hard, but we are careless ; we are touched 
when we do think of it, but we seldom think. 
" So between hard-hearted people, thoughtless 
people, busy people, humble people, and cheer- 
fully-minded people, the giddiness of youth 
and the preoccupation of age, the philosophies 
of faith and the cruelties of folly, priest, Levite, 
masquer, and merchantman, all agreeing to 
keep their own side of the way, the evil that 
God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and 
the evil that he sends us to be mended by us 
gets left unmended." And again we may ask 
what would the Friend of sinners say to this if 
he spoke again and in our midst ? Are not 
our hymn-singings and pious festivities a sol- 
emn insult to him, while no man careth for 
14 



2IO THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

the soul of these? Every Church ought to 
maintain a home for the sick, the poor, or the 
fallen, and where one Church is unable to do 
this a combination of Churches can accomplish 
it. We have to seek that which is lost, for 
the lost have to be sought, and that which is 
not sought will not be found ; and if we do 
not this those whom we have not strived to 
save will rise before us in the judgment, pale 
with agony, scarred with shame, yet aflame 
with anger, the solemn passionless anger of a 
supreme reproach which will crush us and con- 
found us utterly when their stained lips cry 
against us, " Inasmuch as ye did it not to us, 
ye did it not to him ! " 

We may say that we are not wholly to 
blame, nor are we. The sins of the fathers 
are visited upon the children unto the third 
and fourth generation, in church matters as in 
all others. If the Church had from the first 
consistently remembered who it was it wor- 
shiped, what his life was, what his spirit and 
temper were, how different a world would it be 
to-day ! If the Church had known that the 
very seed of its life was in democratic and so- 
cial sympathy, how nearly might the kingdom 
of God already have come on earth ! But let 
us have done with reproaches and attend the 
cry of the earnest and sincere, who ask, " What 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 211 

can I do ? " O, brother, so many things, if you 
will but try. You can at least give a fair price, 
and refuse to sell your sense of right for gain. 
You can see to it, if you be a master, that you 
give your workman just and honest wages; 
and, if you be a workman, that you give your 
master full and ungrudging service. You can 
forswear that most common and damnable 
form of " other worldliness " which consoles 
itself with thoughts of making your own call- 
ing and election sure and blinds itself to the 
wickedness and misery of the world that is. 
You can be the friend of publicans and sinners, 
gentle to the erring, tender to the weak, mer- 
ciful to the wronger and the wronged. " I met 
a beggar," says a Russian poet, " and he 
stretched out to me his coarse, ugly hand, blue 
with cold, and asked an alms. I felt in my 
pocket and was ashamed to find I had nothing. 
I said, ' Brother, I have nothing/ and I gave 
him my hand. ' Thank you, brother/ he re- 
plied, ' that too is an alms/ " That beggar 
felt that brotherhood was more than alms, 
and so it is. To the individual it is always 
possible to be the friend of publicans and 
sinners. 

And through this spirit in individuals the 
State will become changed, and in no other 
way. The inwardness of Christ's method is 



212 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

vindicated by its unfailing success. To whom 
can we appeal save the individual? And 
therefore it is to you I say that all social, all 
municipal, all political questions are religious 
questions, and must be treated as such if the 
kingdom of God means any thing. In the end 
the religious question is the only question. If 
we do not solve these questions in the spirit 
of Christ they will solve themselves without 
us, but in another way. Look at your streets 
and see if that other solution of the problem 
is not already indicated there. In the oldest 
countries of Europe are not the great cities 
full of hollow eyes and famine-stricken faces, 
the scape-goats of our greed, the lepers made 
by our neglect ? And are even the newest 
cities of the New World without this same 
dreadful menace ? And does not the tide gain 
on us? Do not these miserable forms swarm 
up fast and faster, and as they shuffle out of 
the light into their holes and warrens, turn 
upon us angry, wolfish eyes y as though to say, 
" Yet a little while and our turn will come ; 
we only wait the leader and the word, and of 
all these splendid piles and streets of palaces 
not one stone shall be left upon another ! " Is 
that treason? No; it is prophecy. It was 
even so Christ spoke when he warned Jerusa- 
lem that she was neglecting the things that 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 21 3 

were for her peace and would be left desolate 
forever. We may well have ceased to believe 
in the second advent of Christ with any ardent 
hope, for who would not fear if he were to 
come ? Who could dare to say, u Behold, 
Lord, here is thy kingdom : take thine own." 
If he were here would he not again enter the 
temples, and overturn the money-tables, and 
seize the silver chalices, and tell us that our 
best way of remembering his passion would be 
to sell all that we had and give to the poor ? 
Nay, if he came, what Church is there fit to re- 
ceive him ? And is there not but too much 
truth in the savage saying of Carlyle, that if 
Jesus returned a benevolent peer or two might 
invite him to dinner, but that in a year or so 
we should try him at the Old Bailey and exe- 
cute him without fail ? No, we are not ready 
for Christ ; the best of us must needs say, 
" Spare us yet another year," not " Even so, 
come, Lord Jesus." 

But, evil as we are and weak, we will not 
give up this hope of a perfected earth. We 
will remember that great saying of Luther's : 
" We tell our Lord plainly that if he will have 
his Church he must look after it himself. We 
cannot sustain it, and if we could we should 
become the proudest asses under heaven." 
We do not go this war at our own charges. 



214 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

We have the living Christ with us. ' All that 
we have to do is not to resist his incarnation 
in and through us. If we believe in him we 
cannot be pessimists. Pessimism is a disease 
of shallow minds, which attacks mainly the less 
forceful and efficient natures among us ; the 
wider and deeper natures have too much vi- 
tality to succumb. Despair is a disease — the 
sane and sound nature must needs be hopeful. 
A little thought, like a little knowledge, is a 
dangerous thing ; a little more thought will 
often take us out of the storm-belt into the 
far-reaching sunlight. The very fact that these 
problems do move men intensely, that it is 
possible to preach about them, that we are 
willing to hear honest condemnation of our- 
selves, honest exposure of the errors of eccle- 
siasticism and civilization alike, is in itself a 
proof that at heart we are still sound. There 
never was a time when the person of Christ 
attracted so much attention as now. There 
never was a time when the Christian con- 
science was so sensitive to the social problem 
as now. May I not also add, when I remem- 
ber all our great philanthropies, our hospitals, 
refuges, and homes, our great social missions, 
our university settlements in great cities, our 
hosts of heroic workers of whose work one 
hears nothing until the earth closes over them, 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 215 

there never was a time when the spirit of Je- 
sus was so powerfully molding the world as 
now ? If there is any principle of fairness be- 
tween rich and poor, if any right of labor has 
been conceded, it is the work of Him who was 
called the carpenter's son ; if brotherhood has 
become any thing more than a word and an 
aspiration it is the Church of the democratic 
Christ alone that has given even the most 
transient and imperfect expression of the fact. 
And if we reproach ourselves and are keen to 
see where Churches are unlike Christ, and so- 
called Christian civilization a burlesque on his 
scheme of life, it is because we have been in- 
creasingly enlightened as to what Christ de- 
mands of us and increasingly anxious to do 
his will. These are the only two real duties 
for us to perform : the first is, not to resist the 
incarnation of Christ in us by any insincerity 
or selfishness, for if Christ lives in us his king- 
dom must be set up through us. The second 
is to trust him, to keep the light of a great 
hope burning, to believe that his will is being 
done, that he is still working in the world, 
that he must conquer, that every doubt is 
really bringing us nearer in the new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. When I have 
done all I can then I take refuge in Luther's 
daring saying. I believe that Christ knows 



2l6 THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 

how to do his own work and is with us always, 
even to the end of the world. More than once 
in those long nights I spent on the Atlantic I 
went on deck when all was still and felt how 
insignificant a thing was man in all that lonely 
immensity of sea and sky. There was no 
sound save the cry of the wind among the 
spars, the throb of the great engines, the sound 
of the many waters rushing round the vessel's 
keel. I felt the mystery of life ; I was con- 
scious of " the whisper and moan and wonder 
and diapason of the sea." And then out of 
the stillness there came a voice, clear and ring- 
ing — the voice of the man on the look-out — 
crying to the night, " All's well, and the lights 
burn bright ! All's well, and the lights burn 
bright!" How did I know all was well? 
What knew I of the forces that were bridled 
in the mysterious throbbing heart of those 
unceasing engines, of the peril that glared on 
me in the breaking wave or lay hidden in the 
dark cloud that lay along the horizon ? I knew 
nothing ; but the voice went sounding on over 
the sea, " All's well, and the lights burn 
bright ! " And the wind carried it away across 
the waters, and it palpitated round the world, 
and it went up soaring and trembling, in ever 
fainter reverberations, among the stars. So I 
stand for a little while amid great forces of 



THE DEMOCRATIC CHRIST. 21 J 

• 
which I know little ; but I am not alone in the 
empty night. The world moves on to some 
appointed goal, though by what paths I know 
not ; it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. 
And, amid the loneliness and mystery, the 
peril and uncertainty, I have learned to hear a 
Voice that cries, " All's well ! " and tells me 
why all is well ; it is the voice of Christ say- 
ing, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the 
end of the world. " 



For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth 
even unto the west ; so also shall the coming of the Son of 
man be. For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles 
be gathered together. — Matt, xxiv, 27, 28. 

Times which have ceased to believe in God and in immor- 
tality may continue illogically to utter the holy words "prog- 
ress" and "duty;" but they have deprived the first of its 
basis, and the second of its sanction. — Mazzini. 

I shall always respect war hereafter. The waste of life, the 
dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas 
it opens of eternal life, eternal law, reconstructing and up- 
holding society. — Emerson. 



IX. 

NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS, 

When we speak of progress we must ask, 
Whither? When we speak of duty we ask, 
To whom or what ? Progress must have a 
goal. Duty must have a source. There is a 
progress which is progress backward ; or, if 
we dismiss the antithesis, is progress in a 
circle, traveling along a road which seems to 
go forward, but in reality is the beaten track 
along which the innumerable empires of the 
past have marched to ruin. There is only 
one real progress — Godward ; there is only 
one direction in which we can soar — upward ; 
there is only one duty laid on any man — the 
duty of righteousness. When these principles 
are lost individuals and nations alike perish. 
They present the spectacle of a moral corrup- 
tion, waited on by an inevitable retribution. 

In this saying of Christ's we have two illus- 
trations of these truths, each striking and even 
terrific. Christ is picturing the dissolution of 
society, the break-up of old forms of life and 
government, the retributions of iniquity. There 



222 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

will come a time, he says, of infinite disquiet, 
suspense, fear ; of wild questionings and mock- 
ing answers, the firmament of life full of con- 
fusion before a storm, as the sky is piled up 
with huge impending clouds before a tempest 
breaks. In other words, there is a day of 
judgment at hand, and its symbols are the 
lightning and the vulture : " For wheresoever 
the carcass is, there will the eagles or vultures 
be gathered together." 

One of these illustrations is familiar, one un- 
familiar. Let us look at them. 

We all have occasion from time to time to 
know what the lightning is that cometh out 
of the east and shineth even unto the west. 
After many days of heat and sunshine there 
comes a brooding pause in nature. Suddenly 
the singing of birds is hushed in the woods, and 
in the intense silence the troubled whispering 
of the leaves falls upon the ear with an omi- 
nous distinctness. Slowly the wings of the 
storm unfold, and above us huge mountains of 
cloud sail along, darkening all the world as they 
go. The air grows thick and dense, and the 
earth seems to cower in suspense as before the 
blow of some invisible assailant. Then at last 
the silence is broken by the tremendous artil- 
lery of heaven. The storm breaks "like a 
whole sea o'erhead ; " height replies to height, 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 223 

and the foundations of the world seem shaken. 
Upon those vast cloud-towers an awful light 
burns, and then edges flame with a blinding 
fire. For a little while the whole world seems 
given over to warfare, turbulence, confusion ; 
then, suddenly as it began, the rain ceases, the 
lightning dies away in fitful splendors, and the 
sudden singing of a blackbird in the hedge- 
row tells us that the hour of terror is over, the 
storm has passed. That is a scene we have 
all witnessed ; and what is its meaning? The 
veriest child can answer us that lightning is one 
of the great sanitary officers of nature. When 
the air grows thick and turbid, and long heat 
and drought infect the atmosphere with cor- 
ruption, God sends his thunder out to sweep 
the world clean and his lightning to destroy 
that which is a menace in the health of men. 
The lightning purges the atmosphere and re- 
stores to it those qualities of purity and vitality 
which it had lost. Where the carcass is, where 
pollution and corruption lurk, there comes the 
lightning, the swift judgment of God, a terrible 
but wholesome force, the beneficence of the 
Almighty manifested in flames of judgment. 

Look at the other illustration, familiar 
enough to an Oriental, strange only to us. In 
the long march over the desert some man or 
some animal falls, and the dead body lies fes- 



224 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

tering in the sun. The sky is absolutely 
cloudless; for weary mile on mile there 
stretches a profound solitude. But scarcely 
have ten minutes passed over that dead body 
when a small black speck is seen on the infinite 
blue of the horizon. From afar the vulture, 
hunting his prey through the pathless fields of 
heaven, has scented corruption, and with an 
unerring instinct has discovered it. Unseen 
himself, at some immeasurable height in the 
firmament he has seen all that has happened, 
and drops like an arrow on his prey. He is 
the sentinel of an army, and in a few moments 
the heaven is darkened with the rush of wings, 
and his brethren join him in the dreadful feast. 
How it is done we know not ; it is one of the 
standing miracles of nature. But w r e know 
that it always happens with the precision of a 
great law, and if you pass that way upon the 
morrow nothing is left but a few white bones 
bleaching in the fierce sun of the desert. The 
vultures or the eagles have done their work, 
and no trace of corruption is left. So, says 
Jesus Christ, it is in the moral world. At a 
certain stage of decay destruction becomes in- 
evitable. There is a law which works per- 
fectly — one had almost said automatically — 
against every species of impurity ; and swift 
as the unthinkable rapidity of the lightning, 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 225 

unerring as the flight and instinct of the vul- 
ture, the messengers of vengeance fix upon 
moral decay. It is the first duty of God to 
keep his world clean, and the blame and ven- 
geance which sweep away corruption are in 
reality beneficent forces, and the evidence of 
God's fatherly thoughtfulness for his creatures. 
We, who fear the lightning and do not care to 
think of the dreadful work of the vulture, are 
apt to regard them as hateful accidents in what 
we are pleased to call "the beneficent order" 
of nature. But they are not so; they are 
proofs of the beneficence ; they are visible ex- 
pressions of God's good government, the law 
of which is that where the air is thick the 
thunder-storm bursts, where the carcass is 
there the eagles are gathered together. 

Now this passage affords us an insight into 
the great laws of God's government and judg- 
ment. Let us see what these laws are, and 
what are our errors in relation to them. 

First of all, the commonest form of human 
error is to think of such judgments as though 
they were controlled by no law at all, or, what 
is worse, to invent mean theories of law to 
suit our imperfect understanding of the facts. 
Between calamity and judgment there is a 
wide difference, but one which we are often 
quite incapable of discerning. Thus the Jews 
15 



226 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

took the fact of blindness as an evidence of sin, 
and reckoned the men upon whom the tower 
ofSiloam fellas sinners above all men. It is so 
that so many still interpret the solemn calami- 
ties of life, as the editor of a certain irreligious 
" religious journal " did, when he explained that 
the Tay Bridge disaster was God's visible con- 
demnation on the sin of Sunday traveling. 
When we read such blasphemies we cannot but 
rejoice that the thunder-bolts and fiery arrows 
of judgment are not intrusted to the cruel hands 
of men — and religious fanatics are ever the 
crudest of men — but to the wise hands of Him 
who alone sees where immedicable corruption 
is, and destroys nothing that is worth saving. 

But our errors about God's judgments are 
not only in our misreading of their method, 
but also of their essential nature. What, for 
example, is more common than to think of God's 
government as arbitrary and capricious? For 
how many centuries has not the world cowered 
under the fearful gloom of a theology which as- 
serts that God elects whom he will and rejects 
whom he pleases with mere tyrannical caprice? 

44 Who as it pleases best thysel', 
Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell, 

A' for thy glory, 
And not for any guid or ill 
They've done afore thee." 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 227 

When men get to think of God in that way 
two things always happen : first, they never 
think of God as loving, but as tyrannical ; and, 
secondly, human self-complacency is sure to 
lead many of the most worthless of men to 
judge themselves as the elected, and to apply 
God's judgments with the narrowest fanaticism 
to their personal antagonists and enemies. 
That is one of the sure effects of the doctrine 
of predestination as it has been preached. 
Men have made G<pd the patron of their evil 
passions, their prejudicess, their envy, and 
their vanity ; and in reading the sorrowful 
mystery of earth they have arrogated to them- 
selves something of the omniscience of the 
Almighty. And the result has been that they 
have had no accurate conception of what 
God's judgment means, but have habitually 
thought of it as arbitrary and capricious, and 
have sought to conciliate him with vain sacri- 
fice and formal duty. We have feared him for 
his power, and not served him for love of his 
law ; we have obeyed him as slaves, and not 
done his will as children. And then when his 
judgments have broken on the world we have 
not been able to understand them, and still 
less to interpret them to others. We have 
spoken of them as the dark ways of God and 
the secrets of the Almighty, not with any real 



228 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

understanding of those profound phrases, but 
as though there could be the darkness of un- 
righteousness in him who is the light and life 
of the universe. To those who have assailed 
us and our theology with not unnatural in- 
credulity we have had no reply save the stolid 
non possumus of an unreasoning fanaticism. 
When they have cried in their despair that it 
is impossible to believe in a God of caprice 
we have not seen that the God of the Bible is 
never capricious, because we have consistently 
ignored those revelations of God which declare 
him to have no variableness, neither shadow 
of turning, but always to be found acting within 
the sphere of invariable and righteous law. 
The worst result of our narrow interpretation 
of God's judgments is not so much that w r e 
have injured ourselves, but that we have in- 
jured others; for the infidelity of the world is 
the direct outcome of the theology of the 
Churches. 

For, next to the great question, Is there a 
God at all? the supreme question for every 
human creature is, What sort of God is he, and 
does he reign ? To that question the reply of 
the noblest souls has always been, " The Lord 
reigns, let the earth be glad ! " That is to say, 
the nature of God is such that it should be a 
gladness to the earth to know that he reigns. 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 229 

He is the center of all authority, and he is 
righteous: " The soul of the universe is just." 
Who could live in a world that was governed 
by no fixed laws ? What sort of a world would 
that be where caprice ruled every thing, where 
the seasons came as they liked, and the day 
dawned as it chose, and the tides followed no 
intelligible law? Yet that is the sort of moral 
world which many people imagine they in- 
habit. They think of God as plastic to the 
most foolish of human appeals, as a sort of 
throned paternal amiability, and they act — to 
quote one of our most brilliant commentators — 
" as though a fool were on the throne of the 
universe." We could not be glad that such a 
God as that reigned. It would be no joy to the 
earth to be governed by such a being. Nor 
does such a God reign, and the first thing we 
have to record about God is that he works 
within the realm of unalterable and righteous 
laws. We may sing, if we will, for it is true — 

" There's a wideness in God's mercy- 
Like the wideness of the sea," 

but we must also add — 

" There's a kindness in his justice 
Which is more than liberty." 

And this is the meaning of Christ, that God 
is neither arbitrary nor capricious in his love or 



230 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

in his judgments ; both move within an intelli- 
gible sphere, both have a clearly discerned 
orbit, and the law of the judgment is, that 
" Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the 
eagles be gathered together." 

Here, then, is the first truth which illumines 
this saying of Christ's: that judgment is the 
sure result of corruption, corruption the sure 
precursor of judgment, and there is no ar- 
bitrary or capricious element in the calcula- 
tion. The vultures do nor gather where there 
is no carcass ; the lightning does not scatter its 
winged fire where there are no elements of 
foulness to be burned up. The more we know 
of nature the more wonderful and complete 
does her orderliness appear. Why, there is 
not a leaf amid the million leaves of the forest 
that dances in the sunny breeze, not a bird 
that pours out its solitary music, not a grass- 
blade that clothes the hills and raises its tiny 
column of green life out of the warm earth 
that is not fulfilling all the time some law in 
the perfect order of nature. It is in vain that 
we seek in nature for the arbitrary or capri- 
cious element ; the humblest life has some 
mission, some particular function to fulfill, some 
special work to do. Even where we find 
seemingly useless beauty a closer inspection 
always proves that the very beauty itself is 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 23 1 

the servant of some concealed use and the 
output of some hidden law. In our blindness 
we often mistake these meanings of nature, 
and then nature punishes us. Thus, it is said 
that some time ago the people of the Riviera, 
in their passion for gain, thought the swallow 
useless, and when the weary birds arrived from 
their long flight over the sea they were met 
with an electric discharge in the wires on which 
they alighted, and were slain by thousands for 
the service of feminine fashion in Paris. But 
the wise swallows soon discovered the trick, 
and ceased to come, and then the people of 
the Riviera would gladly have given thousands 
of pounds to bring them back again, because 
they discovered, too late, that their vineyards 
were devastated by myriads of insects which 
it was the mission of the swallow to destroy. 
Be sure of it, wherever you find a fact in nat- 
ure, behind that fact there is a law. And, 
says Jesus Christ, it is even so in the moral 
world. There are certain laws, invariable as 
the rising sun, inevitable as the flowing of the 
tide, which may be ignored, but cannot be 
evaded, and which sooner or later make their 
presence felt in every human life. When a 
pestilent gloom hangs over the world, then the 
lightnings waken and go forth upon their roads 
of flame; when the laws of health are ignored, 



232 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

then the plague calls together his grisly armies 
and camps in the abodes of men ; when nations 
grow emasculated with luxury and drunken 
with pride, then war marshals his banners and 
calls on death and destruction to lead on their 
hosts to slaughter ; for " where the carcass is, 
there the eagles gather together." And there 
is nothing wanton in it ; it is the action 
of a law which is in itself beneficent ; and 
when the carcass is swept away, and once more 
the pure winds blow across an untainted earth, 
we can learn to say of God's judgments as 
Wordsworth said of duty : 

"Stern Lawgiver, yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 

Nor know we any thing so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face." 

11 Flowers laugh before thee in their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads, 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 

And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
strong " 

Or we may put the same truth in another way. 
If we ask, What is the order of judgment 
which Christ reveals to us ? the answer is 
that righteousness is sure of divine help, un- 
righteousness is secure of retribution. The 
Son of man comes suddenly, terribly, as the 
captain and avenger of the righteous ; with 
him fly the war-eagles and the vultures for the 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 233 

destruction of wickedness. Amid the noise of 
thunders that shake the world, of iron wings 
and cruel eyes which darken and terrify it, the 
Son of man comes, and by him the world is 
judged. It is a judgment which goes on every 
day. It is not the long-deferred anger of the 
Son, revealing itself in this or that great con- 
summating act of justice. The judgment-day 
is that which " was, and is, and is to come." 
It was yesterday, it is to-day, it will be to-mor- 
row. Its trumpets peal with every dawn. The 
everlasting doors are daily lifted up, that the 
King of glory may ride forth to judge the 
nations and the people with equity. The 
sheep and the goats are already separated, and 
every sunset is the seal of destinies. For 
every sunset marks the completion of some 
slow-working corruption, and overhears " the 
voice of that man in the twilight, like a late 
bird chirrifping, i Soul, take thine ease, eat, 
drink, and be merry,' " who knows not that 
" he is singing his death-song, and that he 
will come no more to the haunts where he has 
worn out and expended the life of his spirit.' ' 
We are told to-day that the maintenance of 
life is a more complex thing than many of us 
suppose, that every breath we breathe is virtu- 
ally a victory over the forces of destruction 
which surround us. We are like men who are 



234 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

safe only as long as we move ; when our active 
vigilance ceases death instantly drags us down 
to the dark chambers of corruption. We 
must maintain ourselves in a certain physical 
state for the air we breathe to invigorate us, 
for the same air which is life to the living is 
the force that works disease in the sickly and 
putrefaction in the dead. To the healthy man 
the world is full of the joy of life, to the 
sickly man of the peril of death. So Christ's 
teaching is that all the forces of the universe 
are upon the side of the good man and against 
the bad man. To the strong traveler who 
pushes his way over desert and mountain 
the vulture is no terror, the eagle is no foe. 
He looks up and sees the great golden wings 
of the eagle of the mountains, like a burnished 
shield flashing in the sun, and he rejoices in the 
vision of his strength and beauty. He sees 
the black speck which he knows is the hover- 
ing vulture, but he knows that he is his friend, 
who clears away putridity from his pathway 
and makes it safe for him to travel where 
many have perished. He watches the gather- 
ing storm, and knows that with the lightning 
comes the rain which will make his path to- 
morrow fresh and fragrant, and the awful roll- 
ing of the thunder is the voice of a friend and 
helper. Thus the force which is terror to the 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 235 

wicked is salvation to the righteous. The pillar 
is darkness to these, but light to those. Right- 
eousness need not fear the vulture; the vulture 
has no power against the living ; it is only where 
the carcass is that the eagles gather together. 

And now let us ask, Are these principles real? 
Can we indeed distinguish them? Is not the 
world after all a mere unintelligible puzzle? 
What evidence have we of this just and discrimi- 
natingforce of judgment of which Christ speaks? 

Let us see if it be not true in relation to 
physical righteousness. It is not without pro- 
found meaning that the words holiness and 
health spring from the same root and have a 
similarity of significance. The holy man is he 
who has absolute health of mind and soul and 
body. He has full control of himself; his de- 
sires are temperate, his passions are held in 
leash, he uses life with just measurement and 
sobriety, and the consequence is that for him 
the joys of life last long and the vigor of life 
is preserved unto old age. But let a man give 
himself over to sins of impurity or appetite, 
and the record is soon graven on the body in 
weakness, suffering, decay. It is no fanatic 
fancy, it is the solemn verdict of universal ex- 
perience that the wicked man does not live out 
half his days. Notable exceptions there are 
and may be, but that is the rule, and it is be- 



236 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

yond question. The vital forces of life are 
wasted in pursuit of pleasure, and the oil in 
the lamp of life burns down in premature dark- 
ness. The vultures of retribution scent from 
afar the odor of moral corruption, for the car- 
cass is there, the corrupt frame-work of a man 
who is dead in trespasses and sin, from whom 
the living spirit which makes a man a nobler and 
divine creature has already departed. We 
know that this is so. Already -over some of 
us, so high we cannot see him, but there 
nevertheless, silent, steady, vigilant, the bird 
of death hovers, and, unless the process of 
corruption is stayed by the miracle of God's 
grace, will presently drop on us like a bolt out 
of the blue, and the judgment of God will con- 
sume us. There is no chance in the calculation ; 
it is the working of inevitable law, that where 
the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered ; 
and the vulture is simply the winged judgment 
of God that waits on moral putrefaction. 

Or look at the working of the law among 
nations, for it is of a nation that Christ speaks. 
There have been two tremendous instances in 
our own times, enacted in all their tragic warn- 
ing under our own eyes. In the Southern 
States of America, a quarter of a century 
ago, slavery was fast destroying the national 
conscience, and the open sore of its defilement 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 237 

was poisoning the world. To the unthinking 
there was no visible sign of decay or retribu- 
tion ; every thing witnessed to an " unexam- 
pled prosperity/' The blue sky had no thun- 
der-cloud hanging on its edges, and in its 
cerulean splendor few noticed the solitary 
black spot, a mere moveless speck in the wide 
expanse of sunlight. But there were prophetic 
eyes in the North that recognized the sign and 
knew that it was the vulture poised in watch- 
ful patience above a gathering decay. In vain 
the warning was given ; in vain the silver 
trumpet of Channing's eloquence and the 
warning note of Lowell's and Longfellow's 
and Whittier's poetry rang in the ears of a 
heedless nation. They recognized the deep 
abiding law of God, that where the carcass is, 
there the vultures gather together. Then, at 
last, the hour came when the vulture received 
the mysterious signal which sent him swooping 
upon his prey, and before the righteous anger 
of a regenerated people the pollution of slav- 
ery was swept away forever. 

Even yet more striking is the case of France 
under the last empire. Every one in those 
days knew that Paris had become the moral 
plague-spot of Europe. Every one knew that 
the " Goddess of Lubricity," as Matthew Ar- 
nold phrased it, had there set up her court, 



238 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

and that the leprosy of an unrestrained las- 
civiousness was eating into the very bone and 
sinew of the people. But few saw the vulture 
poised in the cloudless heaven waiting for his 
hour. France never seemed stronger, her fame 
was never more brilliant, her power never more 
feared, than in the hour when the cry rose in the 
streets of Paris, " a Berlin ! " The judgments of 
God on corrupt nations had been wholly for- 
gotten or ignored, and no one supposed it 
possible that within a few months a nation 
boasting the strongest armaments of Europe 
could be crushed into utter suppliance. Who 
thought of it, or believed it, when the hosts of 
Napoleon thronged out of Paris for the Rhine? 
Who prophesied it when the first telegram 
came with its flourish about the baptism of fire 
at Saarbruck ? But, as the days wore on, 
there could no longer be any doubt that the 
vultures were gathering to their work. Cor- 
ruption was there ; a rotten court, a rotten 
capital, a rotten army ; a mass of hideous dis- 
ease which could no longer be hidden or 
healed. In a single day the empire fell. The 
vulture roseglutted from his feast — it had passed 
away. We see it all now. We know now 
what it meant. Even the most careless and 
least serious of historians is constrained to ad- 
mit it. Once more the iron wheels of God's 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 239 

judgment chariots had rolled through the na- 
tions, the voice of his thunder was heard, and 
the earth trembled, his righteousness was vin- 
dicated, and where the carcass was, there were 
the eagles gathered together. 

Nor does it in the least weaken the lesson 
to reply that in such judgments the innocent 
suffer with the guilty. That is altogether 
inevitable. Nothing in my visit to the States 
struck me with so profound a pathos as those 
vast national cemeteries where often thousands 
lie buried, without a name, unknown but never 
unforgotten, the sacrifices of a nation on 
the altars of liberty and righteousness. If 
there were, indeed, no after-world, if this life 
were all we had, how irreparably cruel and un- 
just all this would appear! What wrong had 
these done that they should be thrust out of 
the sunlight into unrecorded graves ? But just 
because this life is not every thing we may 
surely believe that God has great compensa- 
tions hereafter for those who suffer innocently 
in the earthly punishments of guilt. We may 
say with Lowell, 

" Abstract war is horrid, 
I sign to that with all my heart ; " 

but must we not also recollect that 

" Civilization does get forrid, 
Sometimes upon a powder-cart ? " 



240 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

War is the price of progress, the price of 
liberty, of commerce, of nationality. Shall we 
not be sometimes content to pay the same 
price for purity, for. faith, for righteousness, for 
virtue ? War is the solemn martyrdom of na- 
tions. It is on a vast scale what personal martyr- 
dom is on a small scale. These thousands who 
perish unnamed and unregarded " in one red 
burial blent/' are surely, then, among those who 
lose their life that they may save it. They are the 
nameless martyrs out of whose agony the heal- 
ing of the world comes, and they will not be 
forgotten when God awards the palm, uncon- 
scious as they may have been of any thing 
great or splendid in their sacrifice. 

But it is of more importance to recollect 
how such lessons apply to our own national 
life. It is so easy to watch the judgments of 
God upon others, as men may watch a distant 
thunder-storm with an almost comfortable de- 
light in its aesthetic grandeur, and to forget 
that lightning travels from the east unto the 
west, and is no respecter of persons or nation- 
alities. I sometimes think that there are signs 
that we, too, in England are growing ripe for 
the judgments of God upon corruption. There 
are vices which are eating our life out, as they 
have the life of the nations which have gone 
before us. Think of the frantic shamelessness 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 24I 

of the race for wealth, the avarice of com- 
merce, the cruelties of competition, the wide- 
spread profligacy and drunkenness ; our heed- 
lessness to the cry of national suffering, our 
complacent pride in the presence of the rising 
anger of the underpaid and famished drudges 
of society, the many blots upon our social life 
and our national policies, and say if there be 
no signs of tribulation, no need to scan the 
sky anxiously to see if the first sentinel vulture be 
not already posted there? I know not; I pray 
that it may not be so. But this I know, that 
for us, as for every people since the world be- 
gan, corruption is the sure precursor of retri- 
bution. Neither historic fame nor present 
wealth can save us. When the love of right- 
eousness ceases to inspire us, when public vir- 
tue perishes, and the old pious fear of God 
and the old patriotic sense of duty are ex- 
changed for the unrestrained selfishness of in- 
dividualism, then nothing can save us from 
the vulture. Already the vindictive lightning 
writes its fiery scroll of warning on the heav- 
ens, and happy shall we be if we obey the 
signal and seek healing before decay is com- 
plete and remedy impossible. 

It is by the younger citizens of all great 
Christian peoples that these lessons most need 
to be learned. The future of the nation, of 
16 



242 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

the Church, of the world is with you. You 
must needs be the merchants, the writers, the 
senators of the future. The battle of life 
sweeps on, and the devastation of the years 
will soon leave you in the forefront of the 
fight. You will have to face the awful diapason 
of the guns, and be carried onward with the rush 
of battle, and the banners that fall from the 
tired hands of to-day it must be yours to bear 
on into the illimitable to-morrow. What sort 
of world are you going to make of that world 
of to-morrow? When Quebec was to be taken 
the War Office called its generals one by one 
and asked them what they thought of the proj- 
ect. The oldest said it was impossible. The 
middle-aged said it was so difficult as to be 
nearly impossible. All declined the task, until 
they came to Wolfe, the youngest general of 
all. He said, " I will do it, or die in the at- 
tempt ; " and he did both. There spoke the 
voice of youth, and it is to the young that we 
must look for the enthusiasm, the moral valor, 
the heart of daring that is to redeem the fut- 
ure. But if you are to be the saviours of the 
future you must first ground yourself on the 
belief that God reigns, that God is righteous, 
that the only greatness of men or nations is 
righteousness. This was the soul of the old 
Puritanism, and this must be the animating 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 243 

pulse of the new. What men this solemn, 
awe-inspiring sense of the righteousness of 
God produced in the men who laid the beams 
of empire in New England ! What an En- 
gland, great and strong, indeed, sprang up at 
the touch of this profound faith in the right- 
eousness of God when Cromwell was its ruler ! 
And it is by this, and this alone, that any 
kingdom of the saints can thrive. There will be 
no fiber in your morality, no continuity in your 
reforms, no permanence in your great move- 
ments, unless this is behind and at the root of all. 
Go out, and as with the trumpets of the dawn 
proclaim the new Puritanism ; declare that no 
moral leper shall legislate for Christian peo- 
ples ; declare that what is morally wrong cannot 
be politically right ; declare an equal punish- 
ment for unchastity in man and woman alike ; 
declare your ceaseless crusade against drunk- 
enness and profligacy and gambling, and all 
the vices that spring from an immoral use of 
money, and live to build up the greater Britain 
of the greater soul, the New World of the no- 
bler life ; but remember that first of all and 
chief must come this awful vision of God's law, 
this aw T e-inspiring sense of God's righteousness. 
Get that, and you have got the vision that made 
martyrs strong and reformers confident. One 
thing, at least, the meanest youth can do for 



244 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

the world — he can die for it. One thing the 
humblest may accomplish — he may live a life 
of faith in the Son of God, and act " ever in 
the great Taskmaster's eye. ,, You can fear 
God and depart from evil ; you can make the 
force of a noble character felt by all who know 
you ; and in doing that you will have done 
something to build up a righteous nation. 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low, ' Thou must ! ' 

The youth replies, ' I can ! ' " 

Let us be glad, then, that there is a will 
higher than ours at work in the world. There 
is a Power mightier than armies, and more 
omnipotent than kings, before which all the 
thrones of earth and all its empires are but the 
playthings of a child. There is a force that 
streams round us and through us, which shapes 
the world and overrules its vast designs, con- 
federacies, and purposes. When Robertson of 
Irvine was once traveling in the Tyrol he had 
for comrade a skeptic, and as they climbed 
higher into the black mouth of the mountains, 
discussing as they went, a sudden storm broke, 
and the live lightning leaped from crag to crag 
and the thunder called like a voice from pin- 
nacle to pinnacle of torn rock and gleaming 
ice-peak. " Hark ! " cried Robertson, " cannot 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 245 

you hear what it says? It says, ' I AM, that 
I AM, yea, thou art ! And," says Robertson, 
as he narrates the incident, " again the thunder 
pealed along the cliffs, as if God called, ' I AM, 
that I AM,' and the reverberations of the dis- 
tant mountains to the Brenner of the Bernina 
answered, ' Yea, thou art!" If we care to 
listen that voice reaches each of us out of the 
events of history and the common order of the 
daily life. It rebukes the shallow sentimental- 
ism which discerns only the patience of God 
and not his righteousness, which exalts his 
love, but says nothing of his justice. There 
is no such separation of qualities possible in 
God. His judgments are his beneficences. 
His thunder clears the pathway for his sun- 
light, and the lightning and the light are one. 
If it be of the Lord's mercy that we are not 
consumed, it is equally of the Lord's mercy 
that evil is perpetually consumed. If good- 
ness deserves to live, it is the plainest of 
corollaries that evil deserves to die. If there 
be no judgment of evil, neither can there be 
any coronation of good, for goodness can only 
exist by the extirpation of evil. And if we 
are not willing to acquiesce in the destruction 
of evil, it is because we do not love good with 
any true virility or depth of passion. When 
we love good with all our hearts we shall 



246 NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

realize what these truths mean ; we shall learn 
to praise God even for his judgments, and 
from the lips that are pale with the terror of 
the tempest, not less than from the lips that 
laugh and sing with the innocent joy of the 
sunlight, there will rise the perpetual litany : 
" We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge 
thee to be our Lord ! " 



Blessed art thou among women. — Luke i, 28. 

And they worshiped him. — Matt. ii % 11. 

This, then, I believe to be — will you not admit it to be ? — 
woman's true place and power. . . . She must be en- 
duringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise — 
wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation ; wise, 
not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but 
with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, be- 
cause infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true 
changefulness of woman. — John Ruskin. 



X. 

THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

" And they worshiped Him," not her ; the in- 
fant, not the mother ; and thus the supreme note 
of the gospels is struck. Some impartation 
of divine wisdom, some gleam of divine insight 
guided these men to the true object of wor- 
ship. We may be sure that they were not in- 
sensible to the appealing pathos of the scene. 
It was a scene which poets have described 
and great painters have painted over and over 
again with every grace and force of human art 
and eloquence. Motherhood is always beau- 
tiful ; but here it found its apotheosis. Here 
w 7 as the woman who had become the mother 
of the world's hope, who had given birth to 
the world's Redeemer. Pale with that pain of 
birth, she lay there in the humble lodging, and 
on her bosom slept the unconscious child. Up 
to this point she had been the sacrifice ; she 
had borne the shame and agony for the healing 
of the world. But from the moment the 
divine child is born she recedes into silence and 
insignificance. It is he who is worshiped ; 



250 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

she who is forgotten. It is he who is to move 
onward in the gaze of the world ; she who is 
to stand aside in meek seclusion and silence of 
heart. For thirty years at least her Son is to 
pass his life beneath her eyes. All that she 
does for him in this period finds no record. 
" To live, to suffer, and to be forgotten ; that 
is woman's saga'' says a great poet ; and that 
is the noble summary of Mary's life. We 
catch but faint glimpses of her during her Son's 
troubled ministry. She is at the cross, and at 
the first meeting of the disciples after the ascen- 
sion, and then she disappears utterly from 
history. She has lived and suffered, and is for- 
gotten. She has fulfilled the mission of 
woman's great renunciation. 

To-night * I speak to those who are filled 
with the first ardor and hope of youth, and I 
may seem to strike a wrong note when I speak 
of renunciation. To say so much seems to 
cast a shadow of dishonor on Mary and all 
womanhood. To be forgotten is not felt to be 
an enviable fate. Most of us are eager for ap- 
plause, for recognition, for remembrance. It 
seems to us little less than an insult that he 
who has done or suffered much for others 
should pass into obscurity unrewarded and 

* This address was delivered as the matriculation sermon 
of the Woman's College, Baltimore. 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 2%\ 

even unrecognized. But we have to recollect 
that most of the best work and the real hero- 
ism of the world is performed by quiet souls, 
to whom fame would seem an affront and 
publicity a sort of hishonor. How much did 
Mary do for her child, of which all the world 
reaps the fruit to-day? Was it not her voice 
that first instructed him in truth and taught 
him to teach others ? In the hours of childish 
sickness and trouble whose hands but hers 
nursed the hope of the world ? Well may 
Whittier pray for all mothers : 

11 Make her hands like the hands of Jesus, 

Blessing the little one : 
Make her lips like the lips of Mar}', 

Kissing her blessed Son." 

And how much of the strength of Christ's 
life came from that quiet home in Nazareth, 
where this most blessed of women moved like 
a sacred light and shed a holy fragrance on the 
air ! She asked no higher sphere. To be the 
mother of the Christ was enough for her. To 
stand behind the scenes unknown, unap- 
plauded, unseen, was all that she desired. 
And thus we learn that woman's work in the 
world is different from that of men ; her sphere 
is different, her spirit and temper are different ; 
and to estimate the life of Mary aright these 
things must be recollected 



252 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

Now, to put the truth in this way may seem 
to teach the inherent inferiority of woman ; in 
reality it teaches nothing of the kind. The 
difference between man and woman is not a 
difference of degree, but of order. Woman 
does not and cannot emulate man in many de- 
partments of physical activity. It is not for 
her to lead armies, to guide fleets upon the 
ocean, or to stand in the more laborious ranks 
of toil upon the land. It is for here to share 
all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the in- 
tellectual activities of the world. But essen- 
tially man is ever the worker and fighter, the 
bread-winner, the husband or band of the 
house, cementing its walls with the sweat of 
labor and guarding it against the forces of dis- 
solution which are without. The glory of a 
young man is his strength ; and in so far the 
pagan ideal of manhood has a truth to express 
and enforce. On that ground woman cannot 
challenge or displace man. 

''For woman is not undeveloped man, 
But diverse ; could we make her as the man 
Sweet love were slain ; his truest bond is this, 
Not like to like, but like indifference." 

But difference does not imply inferiority. 
There are other qualities which go to the mak- 
ing of perfect human life besides strength, just 
as there are other qualities besides the untem- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 253 

pered wealth of sunlight which make the 
spring-tide and the summer. Perfect human 
life needs sweetness as well as strength, the 
element of tenderness as well as of force. Life 
is not all lived in the arena and the street, and 
behind the victories of the market-place lies 
the fact of the home. When a man steps out 
into the glare of public labor he is already 
what the home has made him. It is the eter- 
nal and inalienable heritage of woman to mold 
man, to nurture his body into strength and his 
mind into soundness, to equip him for the 
warfare of life and inspire him for its victories, 
to breathe through him the wishes of her soul 
and teach him how to gain the ideals which 
her purity reveals, her ambition craves, her 
love demands. The good woman, by her in- 
tuitions, reaches a realm of truth often denied 
to man in his most logical deductions, and then 
she becomes virtually the inspiration of man, 
and it is thus woman who makes the world. 
" The souls of little children, " says one of the 
noblest women writers of our time, " are mar- 
velously tender and delicate things, and keep 
forever the shadow that first falls on them, and 
that is a mother's, or at least a woman's. 
There never was a great man who had not a 
great mother ; it is scarcely an exaggeration. 
The first six years of our life makes us ; all 



254 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

that is added later is veneer. The meanest 
girl who dances and dresses becomes some- 
thing higher when her children look up into 
her face and ask her questions. It is the only 
education we have which they cannot take 
from us." It is a mistake to say that this is the 
only education, but, at least, is it not a great 
education ? What higher dignity can we con- 
ceive than the dignity of shaping in silence 
and patience the forces that mold and guide 
the world ? Can that sphere be called narrow 
from which such potent influences stream? 
That which woman confers on man is moral 
light and sweetness — 

11 Till at the last she set herself to man 
Like perfect music unto noble words." 

There is no strife for pre-eminence between 
them, no superiority or inferiority. The dif- 
ference is of order, not degree; and that is 
what St. Paul means when he says that 
" woman is the glory of the man." 

Now when we come to ask wherein the 
blessedness of Mary's womanhood consisted, 
the first answer is, in its exquisite purity. It is 
as the Virgin Mary she is spoken of in the 
creeds and remembered by the world. From 
the first moment when she appears upon the 
stage of action there is an affecting simplicity, 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 255 

a delicate, flower-like purity, which distin- 
guishes her and makes her the queen of wom- 
en ; and it is this conception which has sunk 
deepest into the minds of the great artists who 
have endeavored to limn those unknown feat- 
ures. There is not a single painter who has 
violated this tradition. Mary always looks out 
upon us with the placid gaze of an untroubled 
purity, the grace of mingled innocence and 
sorrow, the charm of a soul undefiled and sep- 
arate from sinners; and in this she is the type 
of all that is highest in womanhood ; the 
crown and sum of what womanhood can be in 
its noblest development and most regal grace. 
We naturally ask, What is purity? Purity 
is innocence, but something more than inno- 
cence ; it is modesty, but somthing more than 
modesty. It is the sacred fire which glows be- 
hind both and illumines the whole nature. It 
is the divine armor in which womanhood is 
defended ; it is the invisible raiment in which 
womanhood is clothed ; a sort of garment 
woven of the light, a luminous and intangible 
attire through which we see woman as in a mys- 
tic transfiguration. It was no vain allegory of 
the poet that the lion crouched before the 
maiden ; that there was something in that vir- 
ginal purity and freshness which subdued the 
savage passion of his heart and tamed the 



256 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

brute pulsations of his blood. Mean and gross 
things hate the presence of purity as base rep- 
tiles of the dust shrink dismayed before the 
sunlight ; and for various reasons, reasons 
largely based on temperament and education, 
purity is the crowning quality of womanhood. 
It is the bloom of human life which cleaves to 
woman longer than to man, and is sacredly 
preserved from rough winds by the providence 
of birth and the very order of human society. 
In woman man has always realized the ideal of 
purity, and her impurity is a shock to all that 
man holds dearest. Purity is, indeed, the wea- 
pon by which she masters man, and the pure 
woman is thus to him something angelic, the 
very pride and glory of the world. 

There is in the National Gallery of London 
a picture which has always impressed me, and 
which has quickened and refreshed my imagi- 
nation for many years. It is the picture of 
St. Helena receiving the vision of her martyr- 
dom. She is asleep, and a most moving and 
exquisite tranquillity fills the face as with a 
gentle light. The heavy eyelids have faint 
purple shadows round them, the full, eager 
lips are gently parted, the brow is smooth with 
the benediction of repose, the pose of the 
figure is full of a pathetic langour; and above 
her, seen through parted clouds, is the impend- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 257 

ing cross. The whole secret of womanhood is 
in that noble figure ; for the purple shadows 
speak of suffering, the broad, calm brow of 
thought, the full lips of vigorous life, while the 
dress falling in its simple folds speaks of volun- 
tary poverty, the drooped, unringed hand of 
renunciation, of work well done, of calm and 
quiet pulses, of a lovable austerity. There is 
no tremulous prophetic aureole upon the 
brow, nor is one needed ; we know at once 
this woman is a saint. We know at once what 
that deep langour means ; it is the repose of 
one who works so unrestingly for others that 
when sleep comes it is a divine exhaustion 
w r hich draws the soul forth gently into starry 
visions. Yet it is no ethereal saint we see. 
There is a breadth about the figure, a supple- 
ness and grace that speak loudly of a healthy 
life. The gladness of the sun has passed into 
that smilling face, and the freshness of the 
earth and the glow of human hopes. But 
what we chiefly feel as we gaze is the vital 
force of purity which streams like a subtle 
magnetism from the figure. Base thoughts 
are not possible in the presence of this woman. 
If those eyelids lifted we know well what wc 
should see — the clear, untroubled gaze of a 
wise innocence, which would pierce into our 
souls and shame us out of mean and evil pas- 



258 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

sions. And it is thus that every woman 
should impress the world. It is the gift of 
every woman who is true to the innocent 
thoughts of girlhood to carry with her an at- 
mosphere of purity which brings with it 
cleansing for the world. And thus the hum- 
blest woman may be a saint, enthroned within 
some sacred niche of the temple of humanity, 
and inspiring reverence for all that 4s good 
and true and beautiful, because she herself is 
reverent of purity and truth and goodness. 

And this very instinct of man which clothes 
woman w T ith reverence, and makes her the 
ideal of virtue, confers on you an awful power. 
According as the ideal is high so is the shock 
of disappointment when it is overthrown. 
When we find in you neither the meekness of 
faith nor the obedience of service ; when no 
serious purpose fills your life ; when life for 
you appears to be a thing of mean and trivial 
aims, a vain and restless search after amuse- 
ment, full of wasted hours and idle hopes, 
then, whether you know it or not, you are 
inflicting an infinite damage on the world. 
Woman will always be reverenced as long as 
she deserves reverence. When men cease to 
reverence women it will be because women 
have utterly destroyed their own claim to 
honor. You do that when you waste in dress 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 259 

and gossip a life given for sympathy and serv- 
ice. You lead the world, then, to believe that 
the old chivalrous dream of reverence for 
women was only a dream because there is 
nothing in you to merit reverence, and that 
sainthood was the delusive fantasy of mediaeval 
times, because you show how impotent you 
are to sanctify these modern times. 

This glory of purity, of purity which inspires 
reverence and wins blessedness, is the first 
glory of womanhood ; I pray you to preserve 
it. And remember, even for the girl most 
delicately reared and sedulously defended, that 
it is not altogether an easy task in a day like 
ours. There is no cloistral seclusion in a land 
w T here liberty of printing is allowed. The 
basest secrets of life are betrayed to the gaze 
of the young and innocent in the daily press, 
and the presses no respecter of persons. And 
over and above all this there is a so-called lit- 
erature of realism to-day — a realism of the 
sewer, which rakes the gutter for offal, and 
sees nothing but the base and hideous side of 
life and cares to paint nothing else, and that 
is a perpetual menace to female purity. It 
passes like an insidious disease across the 
thresholds of the most carefully guarded 
houses, and finds its prey in boudoir and work- 
room alike. In a single hour it travels over 



260 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

the pure mind like a withering blast, and 
leaves barrenness where there was bloom, and 
exchanges spring-tide freshness for sterility. 
It strikes most fatally at those in whom the 
imagination is most ardent and the intellect 
most curious. It is a destroying angel which 
haunts the school-room and the street ; it finds 
its most numerous victims among the most 
defenseless of the race — the yonng, the guile- 
less, the undefiled. I have seen books in 
women's hands which it were a shame to read 
and an offense to write. I have known, when 
I have seen such sights, that whatever quali- 
ties of intellect such a woman might possess, 
there was an ineradicable stain and taint upon 
her nature ; and I have lived long enough to 
know what the fruit of such reading is. There- 
fore, I pray you to remember that what no 
force can capture may be sapped from within. 
Remember that touching line of Landor's : 

" Modesty who, when she goes, 
Is gone forever ; " 

and remember that there is a modesty of the 
intellect as of the demeanor. The power of 
woman is departed when the freshness of her 
virginal modesty is destroyed, and henceforth 
the blessedness of woman is denied her. 

The second element in the blessed woman- 
hood of Mary was her tenderness and meek- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 26l 

ness. We cannot doubt that the charm of 
that home at Nazareth was in the tenderness 
of Mary. We know that with his brethren 
Christ had little in common ; but between the 
divine Son and the blessed mother there was 
a bond of perfect sympathy. She alone under- 
stood him. There were angel presences, angel 
messages, and human prophecies, and the many 
significant signs of a divine childhood which 
she pondered in her heart. It was not possi- 
ble for a mother to forget those marvelous 
occurrences which surrounded the birth of her 
child. There w T as the link of a divine secret 
between them, a secret which, no doubt, she 
imperfectly comprehended, but which would 
certainly color her relationships to him with 
a strange tenderness. And her meekness was 
conspicuously displayed on the very threshold 
of his ministry. When the hour had come 
for his first miracle, the hour had also come 
for the renunciation of her maternal rights in 
him. Henceforth he was the world's, not 
hers. He was the Son of man, not the Son 
of Mary ; and the merely human bonds which 
bound him to Nazareth were snapped, and 
snapped forever. He knew that when he 
said, not with rude abruptnesses we often im- 
agine, but with a sigh of infinite love, 
" Woman, what have I to do with thee?" It 



262 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

was Christ's farewell to the home. Hence- 
forth he had no place to lay his head, and to 
that irreconcilable separation she assented with 
perfect meekness. She knew that his obedi- 
ence to her was ended. In a moment the re- 
lations were reversed, and she obeyed him. 
She assented without a murmur to this oblit- 
eration of her rights of motherhood, and it is the 
voice of an exquisite womanly meekness which 
says : " Whatsoever he saith unto thee, do it." 
Tenderness and meekness — the claim of 
tenderness you allow, do you resent the charge 
of meekness? Does it seem a signal of inferi- 
ority to confess that the heritage of woman is 
obedience and meekness? Recollect that these 
are the highest and rarest of all Christian 
virtues. Recollect that in intellectual pursuits 
humility has always been the note of all great 
minds. Recollect that Christ did not praise 
power, but submissiveness, and did not say, 
" Blessed are the strong/' but " Blessed are 
the meek." Perhaps you do not understand 
the word, and therefore you resent it. You 
interpret it as subservience, whereas it means 
nothing of the kind. When I want to in- 
terpret meekness I think of my mother, and 
of all that motherhood means. I see her tak- 
ing no place in the restless publicities of life, 
but moving contentedly in the sphere of house- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 263 

hold toil, with fingers that were often weary 
but rarely rested, and a spirit which recognized 
no drudgery in the service of life. I see her, 
not incurious on the controversies of the hour, 
but turning from them to the contemplation 
of God, and reposing in meek reliance on his 
word, while others doubted and deserted. I 
see the spectacle of the infinite considerate- 
ness of motherhood, and you have seen it too ; 
and what does it teach you if not this, that it 
is the obedience of woman to the instincts of 
her heart which makes her life a blessedness, 
and the meekness of woman in her religious 
faith which keeps alive the pieties of life? 
The triumph of woman's obedience is the 
human home, where daily tasks w r in neither 
wealth nor praise, and the value of her meek- 
ness is its capacity for faith. It was only a 
woman, I think, who could have written : 

* * 1 ask thee for a thoughtful love, 

With constant watching wise, 
To meet the glad with joyful smiles, 

And wipe the weeping eyes ; 
And a heart at leisure from itself 

To feel and sympathize. 

11 1 would not have the restless will, 

That wanders to and fro, 
Seeking for some great thing to do. 

Or secret thing to know ; 
I would be treated as a child. 

And guided where I go." 



264 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

<-> 
O, that is the very distillation of the purest 

spirit of Christianity, the very essence of the 
law of Christ! And it is for you to keep alive 
the fires of human piety. You do so when 
you teach the little children to lisp their 
prayers at night and when you fill the house- 
hold with the serenity of your trust in the day 
of sorrow. You do so when you teach the 
world the value of daily self-sacrifices and 
denials, without which children could not be 
reared nor the sanctity of the home maintained. 
You do so when you turn from the heated at- 
mosphere of theological discussion to the 
place of prayer, or to the service of the sick, and 
vindicate thereby the power of faith and the 
Godlikeness of human charity. That is the 
realm in which you move, or may move, with 
undisputed mastery. The name of Adam 
signified " red earth ; M the name of Eve signi- 
fies " the living one." And in the realm of 
faith man is still " of the earth, earthy " — a 
questioning, halting creature ; but woman is 
the living one, with whom trust is the breath 
of life. We look to you to keep the faith. 
The first words of prayer that whisper in our 
ears of an eternal hope we hear from you ; the 
last hand that soothes the pain of dying men 
and closes the eyelids of the dead is evermore 
a woman's hand ; and when by your meekness 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 265 

you keep alive the piety of man you do more 
for the world than those who found empires or 
explain philosophies ; you become the glory 
of the man, and you earn the supreme blessed- 
ness of womanhood. 

The third great quality of Mary was the 
quality of silent service, and this is the third 
element of her blessedness. It is not enough 
to say that the glory of woman is that she is 
the helper of man. No great cause succeeds 
without woman. No nation can be great that 
does not reverence woman and does not offer 
the freest scope and sphere for her influence 
to be felt ; and I confess that we, as Protestant 
Churches, have not yet recognized to the full 
the power of service that is in woman. We 
have left it to Catholics to form sisterhoods of 
merciful visitation. We, in our dread of 
Mariolatry, have forgotten the women who 
ministered to Jesus, and have ignored the 
presence of women in the Church. Not alto- 
gether, indeed ; we, too, have had our Dinah 
Morrises in the early days of Methodism ; we 
have to-day our Sisters of the People working 
in the slums of London ; and here and there 
we have had our Protestant St. Theresas, our 
Florence Nightingales, our Elizabeth Frys, 
our Sister Doras. I do not say that every one 
of you should go and do likewise. This is not 



266 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

the lesson or the message of Mary's life. You 
cannot all find your mission in the slums, in 
the prison, in the hospital ; but I will tell you 
what you can do — you can attain the private 
sainthood of self-denial and sympathy ; you 
can find some sick sister to whom your visit 
would be sunlight; some little child to be 
made cheerful with your love ; some obscure 
spot of earth to be brightened by your charity. 
You cannot row out against the darkness of 
the night, as Grace Darling did, to rescue the 
shipwrecked ; but you may find next door to 
you some forlorn soul, tossed in the wild 
storms of life, to succor and to save. You 
cannot find cloistral seclusion, as the virgins of 
the early Church did, nor is it well you should ; 
but you can make the nursery a cloister where 
the fruits of God ripen, and the store, the 
school, the home a place where the fragrance 
of holiness may be felt. 

Many of you will toil all your life for bread ; 
many of you will be condemned to something 
worse than that — the inactivity of life which is 
removed from the strenuous need for work. 
Some of you may never know what it is to 
have a home of your own, and life may seem 
to you to spell defeat. But whosoever you 
may be, whatsoever is your lot, you can be 
blessed among women by your helpful sym- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 267 

pathy in great causes and your example of 
perfect and compassionate purity. " They 
also serve who only stand and wait ! " Is that 
an inferior lot which teaches the great lesson 
of self-abnegation to a selfish world, and sup- 
plies the impulse of endeavor to those who 
toil, and of resignation to those who suffer? Is 
not she who passes her life in household duties 
doing that which the mother of Christ w T as not 
ashamed to do? Is not she who brightens 
childish eyes doing w r hat He did who blessed 
the little children, and who was always ready 
to obey the voice that called him to the suffer- 
ing? Is the ministry of love nothing, nor the 
ministry of peace ? O, you have a great 
heritage; a unique and noble glory is yours! 
It is yours to be the purifiers and ennoblers 
of human life, and this is the blessedness of 
woman. 

This, at least, is certain — that whatever 
rights you have Christianity has given you. 
The debt of woman to Jesus Christ is simply 
incalculable. It is he who has emancipated her 
from the tyrannies of human lust and recog- 
nized the true domain of her powers and en- 
dowments. It is Christianity which has 
broken the yoke of unjust laws and has rolled 
away the stone from the sepulcher where 
womanhood was entombed. It is from Chris- 



268 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

tianity that all future emancipations of woman- 
hood must come. And the return of woman- 
hood to Christ has been always unstinted faith 
and love. She has broken the box of frankin- 
cense upon his head and has washed his feet 
with tears. Have you done that ? Have you 
recognized your Deliverer? Have you conse- 
crated your sympathies to him and to his 
service ? You then become not only the glory 
of man but the glory of the man Christ Jesus ; 
for in your womanhood Christ is glorified, and 
through you he again reaches out his hands to 
the world in love and healing. These, then, 
are the great qualities of Mary which make 
her supremely blessed among women, and 
they are the qualities which make all woman- 
hood blessed. Yet the wise men worshiped 
not her, but her Son. And why should they 
worship not Mary, but Jesus? Because those 
very qualities are the qualities of Christ him- 
self. They were his blessedness as well as 
hers. If Christ had been only man, or if 
Christ had been only God, there might have 
been a need to supplement his qualities with 
the softer virtues of the Virgin ; but he 
was more than man and more than God; 
he was humanity. " In him all fullness 
dwelt ; " the fullness of womanhood as well 
as of manhood. It is impossible to study 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 269 

the life of Christ without feeling how entirely 
feminine he was as well as masculine. He 
was man in his courage, his contempt of peril, 
his definiteness of idea, his public activity, his 
passionate hatred of hypocrisy, his broad and 
luminous perception of things. But it was the 
womanliness of Christ we meet in him who 
took strange children in his arms and blessed 
them, and wept beside the grave, and sat at 
supper with the head of John upon his bosom. 
We cannot, alas ! conceive of a man as 
womanly without contempt, or of a woman as 
manly without disgust. We conceive of each 
as having virtues and qualities of their own ; 
but in Christ's nature these two sets of quali- 
ties were truly one. In him there is neither 
male nor female, bond nor free. No soldier 
had more of moral courage, no mother more 
of compassionate tenderness. He can defy 
Herod as "that fox " — there breathes the 
man. He can wash his disciples' feet and bless 
the children — there acts the woman ! And all 
this he teaches us in his oft-reiterated title, 
"The Son of man," by which he means the 
son of humanity; the consummate flower of 
the tree of human life, the exhibition of all 
that is manliest and womanliest alike ; the one 
perfect nature which met the wants of all and 
embodied the highest virtues of all. And thus 



270 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

Mary in her purity, her meekness, and her 
service is but the reflection of a yet more per- 
fect purity and meekness and service — the 
purity of Him whom no man could convict of 
sin; the meekness of the Lamb of God; the 
service of him who gave himself a sacrifice 
upon the cross for the world. Shakespeare 
speaks of a man's tears as " the mother in his 
eyes ; " so we may speak of Christ's tender- 
ness as the mother in his heart — the mother- 
hood of the world which lived there in his 
infinite compassion, as though, so to speak, 
Mary's nature were included in his and rein- 
carnated in his most womanly sympathy. 

But if we ask, Why, then, does a vast propor- 
tion of Christendom worship Mary to-day? 
the answer is very simple. It is because this 
womanly tenderness of Christ has been forgot- 
ten. Those little shrines which the traveler 
sees in Catholic countries ; those rude images 
and paintings of the mother and her child, 
before which the peasant lays his offering of 
mountain flowers as he goes to his work at 
dawn ; or those rapt Madonnas of the old 
masters before which half the world stands in 
admiration, and a great section of mankind 
in adoration still — O, it is easy enough and 
cheap enough to despise them ! It is easy 
enough to laugh at a peasant laying flowers 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 27 1 

before a tawdry doll or bending his knees be- 
fore a rude daub of a mother or child ; but I 
do not laugh, because I see the idea for which 
this stands. That doll, that mother with the 
child, typifies to millions of lonely and troubled 
human souls the secret of a divine tenderness. 
The bruised heart wants no philosophies or 
ethics, it simply wants love, compassion, sym- 
pathy ; and because the early Church made 
the fatal error of exalting Christ as Judge of 
the quick and the dead, and forgetting him as 
the tender human helper, the world turned to 
Mary, the blessed mother, to fill the gap in 
their conception of the divine. When the 
Church forgot the man who wept, and remem- 
bered only the man who judged ; when the 
words of the Good Shepherd were lost in the 
fierce music of the Dies Irce, and through the 
Churches of Christendom the peal of angry 
judgment trumpets sounded, and in their ter- 
rible reverberations the appeals of the Son of 
man were drowned, then the insatiable thirst 
of the human heart for tenderness led it to 
the vision of the mother of God, the womanly 
and pathetic figure of the most sorrowful and 
blessed among women. The instinct was 
right, its direction was wrong. We acknowl- 
edge the instinct, and we give it the true di- 
rection when we proclaim the tenderness of 



2/2 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

Jesus. In him, I say once more, all fullness 
dwells, and because he meets all the needs of 
this various humanity, to him alone every 
knee shall bow and every tongue confess that 
he is both man and God to the glory of the 
Father. 

Jesus is the true vine, the life indeed; but 
not the less we are right in gatnering from the 
Virgin's example such lessons as we may for 
the perfection and strengthening of character. 
We should indeed err if through fear of over- 
honoring the most blessed among women we 
neglect to learn from her as we learn courage 
from the example of Stephen, or penitence 
from the life of Peter. And what is it that 
this life of Mary most clearly teaches us? It 
is the beauty of self-renunciating love, and 
that such a love is a source of blessedness in- 
deed. We know of no marvels in her death 
but this, of no assumption into heaven which 
vies with her Son's in glory, of no power of 
intercession which is hers in the eternal world 
that every other ransomed spirit does not 
share. But we do recognize her simplicity 
and modesty and sweetness, the touching 
meekness and unselfishness of her life ; and 
for these things we honor her and would fain 
have her copied. The very essence of the signifi- 
cation of that life seems to lie in its humility; 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 273 

that it made no claim to honor ; that it craved 
no remembrance ; that it was content to toil 
and be forgotten. And so the greatest Catho- 
lic writer of our times, in describing her death, 
has said: "It became Him who died for the 
world to die in the world's sight. It became 
the great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high as a 
light that could not be hid. But she, the lily 
of Eden, who had always lived out of sight of 
man, fittingly did she die in the garden's shade 
amid the sweet flowers in which she had lived. 
Her departure made no noise in the world. 
The Church went about her common duties, 
preaching, converting, suffering. There were 
persecutions ; there were fleeings from place to 
place; there were martyrs; there were tri- 
umphs ; at length the rumor spread abroad 
that the mother of God was no longer upon 
earth." Yes, her departure made no noise in 
the world ; but that is the fate of the loveliest 
and noblest lives the world has ever known. To 
be contented, if such be God's will, with a 
life of humble tasks and simple joys, to do 
good day by day without supposing that we 
earn thereby either praises or reward — O, 
these are more difficult things than they ap- 
pear, harder almost than the soldier's heroism 
or the martyr's sacrifice. But in this life 
which is content to love, to suffer, and be for- 
18 



274 THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMANHOOD. 

gotten, is the secret of a great peace, an infinite 
blessedness. Such was the life of Mary, such 
was her supreme blessedness. " Blessed are 
the pure in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom 
of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they 
shall inherit the earth." 



Love is the fulfilling of the law. — Rom. xiii, 10. 

For love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of 
God, and knoweth God. — John vi % 7. 

Men may die without any opinions, and yet be carried 
into Abraham's bosom ; but if we be without love, what will 
knowledge avail ? I will not quarrel with you about opinions. 
Only see that your heart be right with God. I am sick of 
opinions. Give me good and substantial religion, a humble, 
gentle love of God and man. — John Wesley, 



XI. 

THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY, 

THERE are two desires in man of which we 
are all conscious, though we are not always 
conscious of them, and they are the deepest 
desires of which the human nature is capable. 
The first of these is to be the highest that we 
can become. All religions arise out of this 
need in man to be something which he is not, 
but which he dimly feels that he ought to be. 
For man is haunted by a vision of moral ex- 
cellence which disquiets him, rebukes him, and 
allures him. He is like a child reared under 
the shadow of a throne, and born in the pur- 
ple, who by some untoward fate is left to grow 
up in squalor and poverty, and who cannot for- 
get the " glories he has known and that im- 
perial palace whence he came." He covets 
that which is above him ; he sees dim shapes 
of power and light and sweetness that ever 
move before him ; he longs for the moral ex- 
cellence which he does not possess. It is to 
that instinct which all religions appeal ; they 
are the more or less imperfect answers which 



278 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

are made to that passion for excellence and 
goodness and moral perfection which has 
stung man with a divine hunger and thirst 
from the beginning of the ages. 

The second dominant desire of man is to 
attain and enjoy the most that he can ; and this 
desire takes a hundred forms. He wants to be 
strong, to be wise, and to be happy. He seeks 
strength, for the glow of vitality is bliss, and 
knowledge, for knowledge is power, and happi- 
ness, because there is within him an unap- 
peasable appetite for joy. In one the desire 
for joy takes noble forms, and he craves the 
visions of art and the rapture of music, and 
seeks to live in a radiant atmosphere of delight 
and beauty. In another it takes grosser forms, 
and the flesh is lapped in pleasurable sensa- 
tions while the spirit perishes. In one the 
supremacy of learning is coveted, in another 
the supremacy of power ; in one the intel- 
lectual part is dominant, in another those 
practical faculties which seize upon the good 
things of life with an iron grasp and retain 
them at all hazards. Before this tremendous 
fact of man's passion for joy religion has 
often stood reproachful, vindictive, and almost 
paralyzed. It has not known how to grapple 
with it, and therefore has denounced it ; it has 
replied to it with the hair shirt and the whip 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 279 

of the flagellant, with the somberness of a 
Catholic or Puritan asceticism, the home where 
the happy instincts of childhood are ex- 
tinguished, the convent or the monastery, 
where the flesh is ceaselessly macerated ; and 
then what wonder is it that men have eagerly 
turned to the prince of this world for help, 
and have sunk under the charms of his terrible 
sorcery ! What marvel that men have re- 
belled against a religion that has made the 
world joyless, and have taken refuge in a 
paganism in whose lips laughter lives and in 
whose lapthe rose-leaves of pleasure lie heaped 
for our delight ! Let it be put down as one of 
those facts which nothing can alter, that man 
is created with a faculty for joy, and be sure 
of it that is no divine religion which attempts 
to crush that faculty. We must enjoy. We 
turn instinctively to bright skies, to bright 
colors, and to bright natures, and we repudi- 
ate the somber and the grave. The only 
question, therefore, is how shall we enjoy ? 
What is true enjoyment, and how is it to be 
obtained ? 

And it may be noticed, further, that of 
these two desires — the desire to be and the 
desire to attain — the first desire often dies 
away, but the second lasts. Men cease long- 
ing to be something ; they never cease longing 



280 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

to possess something. They give up the quest 
of character ; they never give up the quest of 
happiness. They follow that false grail of the 
world's delight through fen and bog, by crag 
and moor, by pathless waste and haunted 
wood, with ever a new hunger growing in their 
heart, content if it gleams upon them but for 
a moment in splendid witchery, and if they 
may but drink of the cup of its exhilarating 
sorcery once before they die. How wonder- 
fully do men recover themselves from the de- 
feats of life ! How they rise up again under 
the arrows of outrageous fortune, and gather 
the torn robe of their happiness about them, 
and begin again to weave the shining weft ! 
How they race after bubbles, fight for trifles, 
pluck the thorns of failure from their flesh, 
and again renew the quest after that fragile 
shining shape of earthly happiness that seems 
to glide through the glimmering woods before 
them and call them with bewitching incanta- 
tions! And then at last men grow weary — 
very weary — and they want to die. They 
have sought and they have not found. They 
have spent their money for that which is not 
bread ; they have built their palace of delight 
with the stones of darkness and the walls of 
confusion. The end we all know. The pagan- 
ism which deifies mere happiness has never had 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 28 1 

but one ending, either in the life of ancient 
Greece or modern Europe ; the end is disil- 
lusionment, disappointment, and desire for 
death, and its death chant, its confession of 
failure, is still heard in the song of the modern 
poet, who sings : 

44 From too much love of living, 

From hope and fear set free, 
We thank, with brief thanksgiving, 

Whatever gods there be, 
That no life lives forever, 
That dead men rise up never, 
That even the weariest river 

Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

That is the end of the quest of mere happi- 
ness — the desire to possess outliving the desire 
to be ; nothing left but this — to rejoice that 
life is over, to rejoice in the hope that it can- 
not be renewed, and that it sinks at last into 
that infinite void where 

44 Sun nor stars shall waken, 
Nor any change of light, 
Nor sound of water shaken, 
Nor any sound or sight ; 
Only the sleep eternal 
In an eternal night." 

Now these two passages are at once the rat- 
ification, the justification, and the explanation 
of these two desires — to be and to enjoy. You 



282 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

wish to be something, do you ? Then here is 
the law set before you — a series of divine land- 
marks setting the course by which you may 
travel to moral excellence. You wish to enjoy, 
do you? Here is the command, " Learn to 
love." Learn to be rid of peevishness and 
jealousy and envy; learn to be tender and 
compassionate and self-sacrificing, and you 
will have lit a fire upon the altar of the heart 
which will keep the whole life in a glow of de- 
light, even in the darkest night of time. But 
you say, " I cannot obey the law." Yes, you 
can. If you once learn to love properly you 
will obey the law, " for love is the fulfilling of 
the law/' So, then, you see these two desires 
to be and to enjoy are fused into one, and they 
admit of one answer. Love is the secret of be- 
coming any thing that is great and noble in 
this life ; and to be great and noble with the ex- 
cellence with which love clothes us is to attain 
the very sum of human felicity. And the sig- 
nificance of these two texts is that here you 
have Christianity in its final solution, in its last 
analysis. Doctrines fade away, prophecies fade, 
complex ethical axioms are forgotten, the met- 
aphysics of theology are all swept aside, and 
there is one thing only which remains — that is, 
love, and love is Christianity. Believe what 
you will and do what you will, become what 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 283 

you may and enjoy the highest as you may, 
if you do not love you are not a Christian, and 
you have not found the true triumph of life. 
Paul and John both found this to be true in 
their own experience. It is no unconsidered 
language, it is the wisdom of a life-time ; it is 
no mere personal confession, it is the exposi- 
tion of a great principle which is to change 
the world. They do not underrate doctrine or 
theology, but they see that there is something 
more important than either — to love God and 
man with a perfect heart. They have, in fact, 
reached that stand-point which is always gained 
by all great religious souls, the stand-point 
from which love appears to be every thing, 
character all in all ; the stand-point of Wesley, 
when he wrote — 

" My brethren, friends and kinsmen these 
Who do my heavenly Father's will, 
Athirst to be whate'er thou art, 
And love their God with all their heart." 

" Love is the fulfilling of the law." " Who- 
soever loveth is born of God/* 

Now, these texts admit of a series of defi- 
nite propositions which may be, so to speak, a 
series of golden stairs up which we may climb 
to that coign of vantage where these two 
apostles stood. The first golden stair is this : 
We ask, What is the origin of love? Chris- 



284 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

tianity answers, Love is of God. Hatred, then, 
is not of God ; it is of the devil. Selfishness, 
jealousy, envy, all that spoils the gentle and 
the perfect life in us — heedlessness of others, 
forgetfulness of the wishes and the hopes of 
others, the egoism which ignores others, the 
strenuousness of personal purpose which pushes 
them aside, to say nothing of the sarcastic 
tongue which delights to inflict pain, and the 
vanity which will sacrifice a reputation for a 
stroke of wit, or the ambition which hustles 
all weaker folk aside that it may reach its own 
coveted goal — all this is not of God ; it is of 
the devil. The original impress of God upon 
this world was an impress of love. There was a 
time when gentleness, tenderness, considerate- 
ness stamped the whole creation, and there- 
fore an unbroken peace covered the world as 
with a garment. Wherever you find these 
qualities still, they are of God ; they are divine 
relics of his workmanship, something saved out 
of the wreck of man, fair stretches of green 
landscape not submerged beneath the flood of 
evil, or else recovered from it. Wherever love 
exists it is a flower of God's growing, for he 
alone possesses the seed. God is love, and 
love is of God. " Every one that loveth is 
born of God." 

Does any one ask, What is love? Are we 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 285 

in any doubt as to what it is? Do we ever 
mistake it when we meet it ? Or do we think 
of love habitually as a matter of mere sexual 
attraction, or as a sort of family quality ? That 
is just where so wide a gulf yawns between pa- 
ganism and Christianity. The god of love in 
paganism is — what ? Cupid ! A mischievous 
boy, a winged and beautiful shape, a troubler 
of men's hearts, a fugitive and irresponsible 
visitor, who sets the nerves tingling with pas- 
sion, but does not touch, and cannot touch, 
the moral nature. The God of love in Chris- 
tianity is Christ, who went about doing good, 
and pleased not himself, but gave his life a 
ransom for many. Compare these two visions, 
if comparison be possible, and mark how vast 
the difference. What wonder is it that love, 
as described by the ancients, is usually a bitter 
heritage, a golden apple of passionate conten- 
tion, and that its records are the records of the 
ardor, the distress, and the unavailing sorrow 
of the individual? But the love which Chris- 
tianity presents to us is something that forgets 
itself and is lost in a renunciation which is 
beatitude. It is not limited, personal, or ego- 
tistic ; it overleaps all common human relation- 
ships, and finds higher relationships with all 
loving hearts. It comes with no purple wings, 
beating a delicate and perfumed air, and stir- 



286 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ring the mere nerves of a man with passionate 
delight ; but it comes as a divine power, which 
enters his heart and transforms it. It creates 
a brother in every man and a sister in every 
woman. It binds a golden girdle round the 
globe, and claims all within it in the name oi the 
love of God. It enters every avenue of human 
life, and sanctifies it. It is mercy when it meets 
the criminal, sympathy when it meets the fallen, 
compassion when it meets the suffering, labor 
when it meets the lost, renunciation when it 
meets the poor, sacrifice when it meets the 
sinful, and it is in all a divine power which 
men cannot help recognizing to be divine. 
Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the love of 
God — love itself incarnated and embodied in 
the flesh, and those who would learn what 
love is must learn of him. 

It follows, then, that there is a second golden 
stair which we may climb. " Love is of God ;" 
that is the first stair. The second is " Love 
in morality/' " Love," says the apostle Paul, 
" is the fulfilling of the law." Let us pause 
again and ask, What, then, is law ? Law is a 
series of instructions and restraints to make us 
like God. It begins at the very lowest level of 
things and tells us not to steal, not to covet, 
not to lie, and not to murder. But these 
crimes and vices are not so much causes as 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 287 

effects. Look at them, and you will see at 
once that they are the fruit of something else. 
For example, were we not, I think about a 
year ago, having a terrible illustration of what 
this means ? For we were then reading, day 
by day, of a murder that had been committed 
in the swamps of Niagara, and such was the 
solidarity of the human race that that isolated 
deed was discussed right round the globe. We 
saw it all enacted, like some stage drama, be- 
fore our very eyes. We saw this man, an Ox- 
ford graduate, a man of good family, a man 
reared in honorable traditions, leading his vic- 
tim on and on to some lonely spot in that dis- 
mal swamp, and then the pistol-shot rings, and 
without remorse he turns away, leaving his 
victim — who has eaten with him, jested with 
him, and trusted in him — to die miserably and 
unpitied. We tried this man for murder, but 
that red blossom of murder was only the out- 
ward sign of something else. Go deeper to 
the root, and you will see that he wants to 
steal, and he covets, and he lies before he 
wants to murder. These were the active 
causes of the crime ; this was the black sap 
which fed the tree upon which this hideous 
blossom of murder at last sprang into life. 
And reduce all these things to a sentence, and 
you have said every thing when you have said, 



288 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

" This man did not love." If he had loved 
his friend he would not have lied to him ; if 
he had loved him he would not have coveted 
his money, still less could he have pushed him 
out of life for the sake of paltry gain, which — 
such is the irony of crime — he never even 
handled. For that unhappy youth literally 
love would have been the " fulfilling of the 
law." 

And you may take the commandments one 
by one and apply this test to them, and you 
will see at once that they would not have been 
needed if only men had loved one another. 
Do you need to be told not to murder any 
one you love, not to defraud him, not to covet 
his possessions, not to dishonor his home? 
Why, we not only cannot do it, we simply can- 
not conceive the thought of doing it. Get 
love, then, and you cannot help keeping the 
law. Get love, and you cannot help being 
moral. It may seem but a scanty equipment 
to produce perfection, and so the seven notes 
of music may seem to be a scanty equipment 
to produce the heaven-born melodies of a Han- 
del or Beethoven. But see how they use them 
— of what infinite and glorious combinations 
are they capable ! How the highest and deep- 
est emotions of our nature find liberation and 
a language as we thrill to the majestic strains 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 289 

which purify and exalt us, which give us visions 
of truth, of self, of heaven, of God, and of the 
joy of God, which no speech could utter and 
no articulate array of words could express. 
Yet there are but seven notes of music in it 
all, something a child might learn in an hour, 
but which a Handel or a Beethoven cannot 
exhaust in a life-time. So it is with this su- 
preme quality of love ! It is capable of all but 
infinite combinations and interpretations ; it 
utters the grand music of heroism and the soft 
lute-music of courtesy ; it is patriotism, it is 
altruism, it is martyrdom ; it stoops to the 
smallest things of life and it governs the great- 
est ; it controls the temper and it regulates 
the reason ; it extirpates the worst qualities 
and it develops and refines the best ; it re- 
forms and transforms the whole man into the 
image of God, for there is no height of char- 
acter to which love cannot lift a man, and 
there is no height of character possible with- 
out it. Love is character. " Love is the ful- 
filling of the law." 

Go one step further. Love is of God ; love 
is morality ; now you find that love is religion 
also. " Every one that loveth is born of God." 
How often do we find in the communion of 
other Churches men who surprise us by the 
spirituality and the saintliness of their lives! 
19 



290 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

We hold such Churches, perhaps, to be in er- 
ror; we can point to a dozen doctrines which 
to us are unbelievable and are rejected by us 
with noble and justifiable incredulity. We 
know that whosoever enters such Churches has 
to subscribe to these doctrines, and therefore 
we should logically conclude that the man who 
lives beneath the shadow of a corrupt Church 
cannot be pure, and the man who assents to 
false doctrines cannot be a child of the truth. 
But love laughs our poor inquisitive logic to 
scorn, and when a man like Cardinal Newman 
dies the whole religious world, without distinc- 
tion of denomination or sect, feels that a dedi- 
cated life has ended, that a light from God is 
extinguished. Love looks into the secret of 
his character and proclaims, " He that loveth 
is born of God," and all who do truly profess 
and call themselves Christians praise God for 
the image of God in Cardinal Newman. 

Or how frequently, again, do we find that 
people who profess piety lack something which 
we expect them to possess, and people who 
make no profession of piety often have that 
indefinable charm of a gracious nature which 
makes us feel somehow that religion is a real- 
ity. Without apparent effort such people dif- 
fuse happiness around them because they are 
sweet-tempered and quick to help and consid- 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 29 1 

erate of others, and inconsiderate only of them- 
selves. We know all this, yet we are troubled 
about them, because no definite profession of 
piety is upon their lips. We feel the divine 
charm of their presence, yet we are concerned 
because they hide in sacred reticence the deep- 
est feelings of their hearts. We know that 
their whole life is a life of love — disinterested 
and laborious love — ministering to others and 
seldom ministered unto, yet we permit our- 
selves insolently to wonder if they are born of 
God. Wonder no longer ! " Every one that 
loveth is born of God." 

How often has it happened that the sweet- 
est and most gracious of lives closes without 
sign, is withdrawn without opportunity for re- 
ligious profession or farewell ! Perhaps it is 
some fair girl, whose flower-like maidenhood 
has been a fragrance and a joy, whose short 
life has been pure and loving and blameless, 
and yet you are troubled because those closed 
lips made no positive profession of faith in 
Christ before the end. And do you think so 
ill of God's insight, of Christ's understanding 
of your child's life as that? Do you suppose 
the Father does not know his own ? Poor 
mourning, troubled heart, behold, I say to you, 
in the name of Christ, " Let not your heart be 
troubled," " Every one that loveth is born of 



292 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

God." It is easier to quote Scripture on a 
death-bed than to live a life of love, and these 
chose that more difficult and better part which 
shall not be taken away. And remember that 
this is the brief summary of all the teaching 
of Jesus; in the story of the good Samaritan ; 
in the parable of the prodigal son ; in the in- 
cident of Dives and Lazarus ; in his words to 
Peter about forgiving seventy times seven ; in 
his apology for Mary Magdalene, that she 
loved much and therefore was forgiven much ; 
in his own conduct to his disciples, both be- 
fore and after the resurrection ; in his beati- 
tudes and in all his words, all his deeds, the 
great lesson that Christ tries to teach us is 
that the supreme quality is love. He sums up 
the whole human race in himself, and makes 
humanity the concrete Christ whom we are to 
love. He does not ask us for adoration, for 
praise, or for worship, but he commands us to 
love all men and to see him in the low r est and 
most forlorn of all. He specifically says that 
an act of kindness is a thing which cannot be 
forgotten, even at the judgment-seat, and that 
when we stand there the one supreme test by 
which we shall be all tried will be, Have we 
loved or not ? And that is, after all, the only 
possible test when you think of it, because 
love is the real flower and fruit of all religion. 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 293 

It is religion, it is piety, it is more than either 
faith or hope — it is the very soul of both. 
" Love is the fulfilling of the law." " Now 
abideth faith, hope, love, these three ; but the 
greatest of these is love." 

And then take one more golden step. Love 
is of God; love is morality; love is religion ; 
lastly, love is life, love is immortality. " Every 
one that loveth is born of God " — born into a 
larger life, born into the spaciousness of an 
eternal life. We sometimes permit ourselves 
to debate whether life is not more than love. 
There are times when we are impressed with 
the spaciousness of this life of ours, when we 
suddenly realize the joys of living, and are 
athirst to drink a full draught of life. We 
want to know every thing, we want to under- 
stand every thing, we would fain mix in the 
most crowded places of life and feel the pulsa- 
tions of the tide of humanity, and move amid 
its swiftest currents, and in such an hour we 
ask ourselves, What is love? Surely it is 
nothing more than a mere episode in the great 
drama, one of the many fruits of life — perhaps 
the choicest, but that is all. For when that 
passion of mere living possesses us it eclipses 
all other passions, and then w r e turn away from 
love because we see that it is a yoke, because 
we believe it to be a renunciation of the full- 



294 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

ness of personal life, because it is the subjuga- 
tion of our nature to the exigencies and the 
needs of another nature. The man or woman 
who does this usually lives to learn that love, 
after all, is the one thing worth living for, and 
they often know what it is to sit amidst the 
ruins of life in a friendless old age, amidst gains 
and gauds that have lost their charm, and to 
long with inexpressible yearning for one drop 
of that cup of love which they once so con- 
temptuously rejected. For the truth is that 
love is life ; it is the only true and eternal life ; 
it is the birth of a man's soul into a higher 
state of being. Look back over the past and 
tell me what are the Pisgah moments which 
stand out in the retrospect of life, what are 
those hours that are most distinctly recollected 
as the supreme hours in a life-time ? They 
are the moments when we loved the most, and 
when we gave ourselves away, when we lost 
the sense of self; then the bells of life rang 
with a mellow chime indeed, and there was no 
discord of sweet bells jangled. Then our nat- 
ure did actually find its full expression, its 
highest exposition, for then we were filled with 
the spirit of love, and we were sharing the life 
of the God of love. You will never know the 
fullness of life until you know the fullness of 
love, for " every one that loveth is born of God. " 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 295 

There, then, as I have said, is the last anal- 
ysis of Christianity, and I pray you to accept 
it. Like all profound things, it is really sim- 
ple ; it is, in fact, so simple that men doubt 
whether it can be true. Men cannot make 
themselves believe and understand that Chris- 
tianity is merely love ; that a great church is 
simply the temple of love ; that what all this 
elaborate organization of worship and preach- 
ing aims at is this — to teach men to love God, 
to love each other. Men cannot be brought to 
understand that when they have once learned 
to love all social problems will be swept away 
and all social sores will be healed. And be- 
cause men cannot accept a solution of Chris- 
tianity so simple they go on inventing, from 
age to age, hundreds of other definitions, and 
they overlook one thing which is every thing. 
Let your definitions go ; do not try to narrow 
and belittle Christianity to suit your own narrow 
creed. Do not try to pour the ocean into a 
pint pot. Christianity is as broad as the heav- 
ens, religion is as vast as the sea, and its true 
definition is : " Every one that loveth is born 
of God. ,, 

And by whatever public test we may meas- 
ure Christianity, we do in our private thoughts 
and our habitual actions apply this test and 
no other. We drop our theology out of sight 



296 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

when we have to deal with each other in pub- 
lic, in commercial and family relationships. It 
is impossible to persuade any jury of intelli- 
gent, observant men that the man who is mean 
and avaricious in his commercial transactions, 
ill-tempered, or violent, or peevish in his fam- 
ily relationships, spiteful and contentious in 
his social life and conversation, is really, after 
all, a good man, because he firmly holds cer- 
tain articles of belief, and is a man to whom 
great deference and respect are paid in the 
church on the Sabbath day. It is impossible, 
I say, to persuade any jury of intelligent men 
that the man who is a domestic tyrant, a hard 
master, an austere and loveless man in the 
home, shunned by his children, dreaded by his 
wife, disliked by his servants, is really, after 
all, a child of God because he reads the Script- 
ure every morning, and can define and illus- 
trate, with copious quotation, every dogma of 
the Christian faith. Yes, and it is equally im- 
possible to persuade men that the patient 
mother, toiling unweariedly for her children, 
the good and gentle girl, whose presence in 
the home spreads serenity, the one whose hand 
was ever ready to help us in our childish 
troubles, whose voice has often soothed our 
later griefs and desolations, is, forsooth, not a 
good woman, not a child of God, because her 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 297 

face is not familiar in the select companies of 
the earthly saints. We measure sainthood by 
other tests than these; our measurement may 
be rough, but at least it is true and it is safe. 
We say this man is a good man, not because 
he says he is converted, but we say he is con- 
verted because we have found out that he is 
good. We say, " he can't be wrong whose life 
is in the right," and that much controverted 
phrase of Pope's is, after all, but a paraphrase 
of the word of Christ, " He that hath my com- 
mands and doeth them, he it is who loveth 
me." When we meet these lives of silent 
goodness we know them to be divine creations 
by whatever names they are called. Some- 
times they are 

11 The holy sisters who with wakeful eyes 
Watch by the siek in dreary hospitals, 
Close to the battle-field. Sometimes we see 
The face gleam out beneath a Quaker hood, 
With exquisite eyes of silent blessedness. 
Then all our spirit rises up in praise 
Because God's world holds in its wrecked design 
His image still, who made it very good." 

This may be heresy, but it is not my heresy ; 
it is the heresy of the apostle John, who has 
defined the only true catholic and apostolic 
Church when he says, " Every one who loveth 
is born of God." 

And as I close there seems to pass before 



298 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

my mind a vision of how these principles may 
apply in all directions, how they may radiate 
like a divine light and lift the darkness of the 
world. There, for instance, is Buddhism, with 
its lovely story of Gautama. We hear Gautama 
saying, as he goes forth from his palace to live 
and die for the poor : 

11 Thou knowest how I muse these many moons, 
Seeking to save the sad earth I have seen, 
And how my soul yearns sore for souls unknown, 
And bow I grieve for griefs that are not mine." 

Or, if it be objected that this is but a poetic 
interpretation of the legend of the Buddha, we 
may take Gautama's own words : " Never 
will I seek or receive private salvation, never 
enter into final peace alone ; but forever and 
every-where will I live and strive for the uni- 
versal redemption of every creature/ ' Is there 
no divine accent in this? Can any who attain 
to this spirit ever fail to please God ? Can 
any please God without attaining to it ? Here 
is the teaching of Christ upon the lips of Gau- 
tama ; here is the love which redeems, and 
surely as we think of it a new hope dawns 
upon us, and we see that in the day of judg- 
ment there may be those who shall come from 
the north and south and from the east and 
west, of whom we have never dreamed, and 
shall sit down in the kingdom of the Father, 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 299 

because every one that has learned the spirit 
of Christ, howsoever he has learned it, is born 
of God. 

There is the great preacher yonder, whose 
orthodoxy and heterodoxy were the conversa- 
tion and the discussion of all the Churches 
around the world. I see him as he preaches 
his last sermon, not knowing it to be his last. 
Then, when the lights are lowered and the 
crowd has gone, there come into the church 
two little ragged, wretched lads, and I see the 
great preacher talking to them of the love of 
Christ, and stooping over them with tender 
fatherliness. Then he tells the choir to sing 
for them : 

4< I heard the voice of Jesus say, 
4 Come unto me and rest ; ' " 

and lays his hand in blessing upon those little 
waifs, and thus Henry Ward Beecher leaves 
the church where he has ministered for a life- 
time and goes home. Do you think I want 
to hear any more chatter about his orthodoxy 
and heterodoxy? I have looked into the very 
heart of the man, I have had a vision of the 
inmost essence of his life, I have seen the 
spring and fountain of it all ; and I know that 
he has the great compassionate Christlike 
heart beating in him, and " Every one that 
loveth is born of God." 



3.00 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

And so I look into the great world of 
commonplace life round about me, and I see 
how this text radiates the light every-where. 
There was a student once who asked Robertson 
of Irvine the old scholastic quibble, whether 
he could tell how many souls could be sup- 
ported on the point of a needle. " O, dear 
me, yes," said he; " that is easy enough. I 
can tell that." " How so? " said the student. 
"■Well," said Robertson, " as I was walking 
home the other night along the sea-shore I 
passed a house where a poor widow lives; her 
husband was drowned at sea last winter. She 
has five little children, and as I looked through 
the window I saw in the fire-light two little 
golden heads in the bed yonder, and another 
little golden head in the cradle, and two other 
children sitting at the mother's knee. She was 
working away with her needle, and it was 
flashing in the fire-light, and was going as hard 
as it could go. So," continued Robertson, " I 
know how many souls can be supported on the 
point of a needle — five, don't you see ! " 

And as I look through that window I seem 
to look upon the whole vision of domestic life, 
on mothers toiling and never calling it toil, on 
the vision of innumerable women all the world 
over who give themselves away and are not 
so much as thanked for it, on the silent hero- 



THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 301 

isms which redeem life and which are its 
unuttered poetry, its saving salt, its divine 
attestation. And these heroisms which are 
the birth of love are every-where. The most 
defective human souls are capable of them. 
In any pure love, however partial and imper- 
fect its scope, there is always something that 
transforms — nay, that transfigures. Every bit 
of common glass can reflect the sunlight, and 
every heart that loves in the very act of lov- 
ing reflects some broken ray of the love of 
God. To love is essentially a religious act. 
Do not think, then, of religion as a new, 
strange, beautiful graft upon the tree of human 
life — it is of its essence. Do not think, then, 
of the Church as a company of elect and select 
souls gathered out of the moral ruins of the 
world ; the Church is larger than we think, 
and Christianity is larger than the Churches. 
Christ comes not to destroy human nature, 
but to fulfill it, by guiding it to its highest 
development. And in all lands, and among 
all peoples, in obscure directions undiscerned 
by us, in all lives that love and suffer and sac- 
rifice themselves uncomplainingly for the good 
of others, these higher developments already 
exist, and are not unrecognized in heaven. 
The calendar of saints is known alone to God, 
and there are strange names in it, the names 



302 THE LAST ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

of secret saviours of the poor, of hidden help- 
ers of the needy, verily a great multitude 
which no man can number. 

And so I rejoice. I see a world that is not 
outcast, not wholly evil, and not forsaken, for 
love works in it still, and God is love, and love 
is every-where. Like a great bell of hope, 
mellow, ceaseless, glorious in its music, the 
words of John ring across the world, " Every 
one that loveth is born of God and knoweth 
God." 



There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, 
that all men through him might believe. — John i, 6. 

And the common people heard him gladly. — Mark xii, 37. 

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman 
took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was 
leavened. — Matt, xiii, 33. 

Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing to be 
struggled for. We will praise the Hero-priest, who does what 
is in him to bring them in : and wears out, in toil, calumny, 
contradiction, a noble life to make God's Kingdom of this 
Earth. — Thomas Catlyle. 



XII. 

WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

I AM aware that between these passages of 
Scripture there is no exegetical coherence ; but 
they may serve to furnish us with suggestions 
for the great occasion which attracts our atten- 
tion to-night. They may be justly said to sum 
up a great life and a great movement, and 
thus they have a vital, if not an exegetical, co- 
herence. They in turn explain the character 
of Wesley, the nature of his work, and the 
philosophy of its success. To the whole world 
that life and work have long afforded a fasci- 
nating study. It is said that art knows no 
frontiers, and neither does Christianity ; and 
all the demarkations of sect disappear and are 
forgotten in the common interest we feel in a 
chapter of Christianity — the most wonderful 
and far-reaching in its effects since the Refor- 
mation. We do not celebrate the success of 
Methodism ; we celebrate the triumph of 
Christianity. We do not ask you to join with 
us in the laudation of a man or a system, but 
to thank God for one of the most fruitful forces 
20 



305 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

that has ever worked in the world for the ex- 
altation of human life and character. Men 
like Wesley belong to no Church ; they are 
the property of Christendom. They have 
originated not local and limited, but pervasive 
and universal forces. To mention their names 
is to breathe the larger air of a catholic charity 
where only the broader aspects of things are 
remembered and the petty and sectarian are 
forgotten. We can scarcely speak of such a 
man as Wesley as dead; he is enthroned in 
the unchanging exaltation of those dead but 
sceptered monarchs w r ho still rule us from 
their urns ; he has 

" Joined the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead who live again 

In minds made better by their presence — live 

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 

And with their mild persistence urge man's search 

To vaster issues." 

I. Now the first passage describes a phe- 
nomenon with which we are familiar in his- 
tory — the advent of the man with a mission. 
John the Baptist was a burning and a shining 
light, the very type' of the man with a mission. 
When an age has grown utterly corrupt, when 
morality has lost its security and religion its 
impulse ; when the Church has become 
lethargic, and good customs themselves only 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 307 

swell the general corruption, because the spirit 
of their observance is Pharisaic and not sincere ; 
or when secular liberties are lost, and tyranny 
is militant and unrebuked, and wealth remem- 
bers its privileges and ignores its responsibili- 
ties, then the man with a mission usually 
appears. It seems as though God tries the 
patience and faith of men to its last limit by 
postponing the appearance of the deliverer till 
things are at their worst, and sometimes the 
deliverer himself comes as a scourge, an icono- 
clast, a sword that is whetted for vengeance. 
The awakening of the European democracy 
and their emancipation came through the per- ' 
son of a Bonaparte, and by a long succession 
of wars in which every throne was shaken and 
crown after crown was tumbled in the dust. 
The awakening of the democratic instinct in 
the religion of Europe came through Luther/ 
and in each of these cases it was the very 
degradation to which things had sunk which 
made the awakening possible. Whoever misses 
the psychologic moment in common politics, 
God never misses it in the government of his 
world. The hour is timed to the man, and the 
man is prepared for the hour. When that 
hour strikes the man always stands ready, and 
the word for which ages have waited is spoken, 
the deed is done, the mission is fulfilled, and 



308 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

the burning and shining light is with us for a 
season. 

But in the religious sphere this phenomenon 
has two conditions, and the first is that such 
* a man always has the consciousness of a direct 
relation to God. He lives as ever in the great 
Taskmaster's eye ; but not only that, he lives 
as seeing the invisible. An awful conscious- 
ness of the infinite and eternal is always his. 
By signs that are indubitable to him, by the 
secret and mysterious assurance of his own 
spirit, by those delicate results which expe- 
rience registers on his consciousness, and which 
are the data of a true spiritual science, he 
knows in whom he has believed, and is abso- 
lutely sure of the reality of unseen things. 
When this temper is carried too far it ends in 
mysticism, and then all power of action per- 
ishes. Wesley has himself expressed this 
temper when he says, " It is so far from being 
true that there is no knowledge after we have 
quitted the body that the doubt lies on the 
other side, whether there be any such thing as 
real knowledge till then ; whether it be not a 
plain, sober truth, not a mere poetical fiction 
that 

'All these are shadows which for things we take, 

Are but the empty dreams which in death's sleep we make.' 

It is, indeed, the temper of Shakespeare when 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 309 

he says, ' We are such stuff as dreams are 
made of' " — and of Burke, when he cries over 
his dead Absalom, " What shadows we are, 
and what shadows we pursue/ ' 

But from this paralyzing quietism the man 
with a divine mission is saved by the pre- 
dominance in him of the practical faculties. 
He feels the overwhelming presence of God 
indeed ; his eye is always uplifted to the in- 
finite ; but a supreme urgency of endeavor 
possesses him also. And the practical force of 
his life thus draws its strength from his con- 
vincing sense of the unseen. He stands in 
direct contact with God as the channel through 
which a divine force flows. He is secure in a 
divine strength, nourished with a divine ardor, 
conscious of a divine power which uses him 
at its will, but always for the best. He is 
serene, courageous, secure, because he is not 
his own. Thus Christ with majestic tranquillity 
fronts his enemies and says his hour is not yet 
come ; and Knox, rowing in the galleys, sees 
afar the towers of St. Andrew's and assures him- 
self he shall yet preach beneath their shadow ; 
and Newman says, as he lies at the gates of 
death, " I have a work to do ; I shall not die." 
In other words, this man is a man who is sent 
of God, and who is supported in the perils and 
discouragements of his work by the sense that 



3IO WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

behind him there is an infinite power which 
has commissioned him and will sustain him. 

The second condition of such a life is that 
it displays the candor and sincerity which are 
always the marks of the highest minds. u If 
it were not so, I would have told you," says 
Christ, thus striking the note of a supreme 
candor which desires nothing but the truth, 
and is willing to sacrifice all things to the 
truth. " But now ye seek to kill me, a man 
who hath told the truth which I have heard 
of God," he says again, and therein expresses 
a supreme sincerity too. In the man with a 
religious mission these two qualities must 
always be the governing qualities. For what 
is the work of such a man but to declare that , 
which he has heard of God? That is his 
" sign and note and character." He is, in 
truth, a prophetic man, who hears the heavenly 
voices, and looks into the unseen mysteries, 
and speaks the words which are for the heal- 
ing of the nations. But those words are not 
his own, but the Master's who sent him. If 
he be overcome by personal ambition or love 
of power; if he listen but for a moment to the 
voices of expediency and compromise ; if he 
be deflected from the simplicity and docility 
of the learner who seeks to know and do the 
will of God, by any power of prejudice, by any 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 311 

pride of will, by so much has he lost the power 
to bless his generation and to interpret to it 
the things which have been hidden or forgot- 
ten. By so much he ceases to be a prophetic 
man, and his mission is betrayed. For to ful- 
fill that mission the clearest sincerity, the ut- 
most intellectual candor, are needed. When 
the bright luster of this spiritual sincerity is 
dulled he no longer has the instrument by 
which the will and truth of God are perfectly 
reflected. And thus the second great charac- 
teristic of the religious reformer is that he is 
a witness to the light. He dwells in the 
brightness of God, and declares it ; he sees the 
truth, and is absolutely loyal to it ; he prefers 
the truth to all personal prejudice or predilec- 
tion ; he speaks it to his own dismay, his own 
loss of esteem and reputation among men ; 
but through the truth he is strong, and be- 
comes one of those enduring forces which defy 
the havoc of the centuries and the insolence 
of man's contempt. These are the two great 
characteristics of the religious reformer ; he is 
a man sent of God, and he is the witness to 
the light of God. 

Here, then, is the key-note to the character 
and life of Wesley, nor can any phrase de- 
scribe him better than this : he was " a man 
sent of God, to bear witness of the light. M 



312 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

Think for a moment of the development of 
his convictions, and see how admirably these 
conditions of the consciousness of a mission, 
and the temper of spiritual candor, are fulfilled 
in him. We see him growing up in a youth of 
grace and virtue, for, like John Milton, he had 
kept his life unsullied. His youth, indeed, has 
many things in common with the youth of 
Milton. He leads an equally strenuous in- 
tellectual life ; he is in great repute as a youth 
of noble parts ; there is a gracious austerity 
about him, a fastidious purity, a certain lofti- 
ness of aim and demeanor which keeps vice at 
a safe distance ; he is skilled as a poet, logician, 
and linguist; and in the ordinary course of 
things such a youth would have passed into a 
manhood of dignified scholarship and easy 
esteem. But from the first a sense of destiny 
at times oppresses him. He writes his brother 
Charles that he must set certain doubts at 
rest by getting clearer views, because clearer 
^ views may be of incalculable service to un- 
counted generations. This is extraordinary 
language in a youth who has done nothing to 
show that he has a great part to play, and it can 
only be explained by the sense of a mission 
which was already growing in him. Consider 
this youth, then, bred in clerical seclusiveness, 
and mark how eager and candid he is in his 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 313 

search for truth. He is always seeking some 
one who can teach him. He has a singular 
openness of mind, and is ready to receive in- 
struction from any one who can confer it./ 
Long before he has found the light he is the 
most prayerful of students, and his fellow colle- 
/ gians notice that his face shines with an inward 
glow after he has spent hours in prayer. So 
we follow the familiar story — tracing Wesley's 
progress through ritualism and mysticism, 
/ marking how earnestly he strives for the de- 
( layed light, how perfectly he lives up to the 
light which he possesses — until we come to 
that supreme moment when Peter Bohler, the 
Moravian, makes clear to him what true relig- 
ion is, and how it may be obtained. How 
willing he is to be led ! How humbly has he 
followed every clew of truth which has been 
his ! And now, after thirty-five years of slow 
and doubtful progress, on this memorable 
night of May, a hundred and fifty-three years 
ago, in the old room in Aldersgate Street, he \ 
feels his heart strangely warmed, and " felt 
that he did trust in Christ — Christ alone— for 
salvation." It was the moment of Wesley's 
conversion ; the hour when his mission was 
realized. There arose a force which has over- 
flowed the world ; in that little room Method- 
ism began, and its cardinal truth was that 



314 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

men could be converted — and know that they 
were converted. Baptism, confirmation, sacra- 
ments — all that made the early religious life 
of Wesley— sank into the background, and a 
living faith in Christ became every thing. For 
Wesley " the birthday of a Christian was 
shifted from his baptism to his conversion, and 
in that change the partition-line of two great 
systems is crossed." It was to witness to that 
great truth that Wesley henceforth lived ; it is 
that truth which every-where illumines the 
poetry and teaching of both the brothers; it is 
that truth which has in a hundred and fifty 
years built up the largest Protestant commu- 
nity upon the face of the globe. 

And thus Wesley, in the most literal sense, 
was a witness of the light. The most perfect 
counterpart of his life was the life of St. 
Paul. St. Paul also described himself as a 
witness, who testifies to the " Gospel of the 
grace of God." Paul's crowning argument 
was himself. He had no theories to expound, 
no speculations to elaborate, no new philoso- 
phy to establish. He entered the great centers 
of Greek learning not to add another cult, or 
play the part of a new Socrates; his was a 
sublimer and far simpler mission. He came 
to tell them that once he was blind, and now 
he saw ; once he was in bondage, but now he 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 3 I 5 

was free; once he was a blasphemer, but now 
he was a missionary of the name he ignorantly 
blasphemed. His constant test was experi- 
ence. What he had been he knew others 
were ; what he was he knew others might be- 
come. With sublime egotism he called atten- 
tion to himself as a living fact, and said, " I, 
Paul, once a blasphemer and injurious, now an 
apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, salute you.'* 
He was a witness to two things: that he was 
a sinner, that he was a sinner saved. He took 
it for granted that all were sinners ; the fact 
was indisputable. What he had to tell them 
was how they might know the truth, and how 
the truth might make them free. To the 
mere speculative opinions of philosophy he 
paid no heed. He said, " I, Paul M — never 
mind how you explain creation and the origin 
of things — how do you explain me ? To the 
question how this great change was wrought 
in him, he had one invariable reply — " by the 
grace of God, I am what I am." Before syna- 
goges and Sanhedrins, mobs and magistrates, 
keepers of jails and Roman governors, where- 
ever we follow him, he founds his whole doc- 
trine upon a great personal experience. And 
that was precisely the work of Wesley. Against 
the scornful criticisms of men he set the ex- 
perience of the individual. He found the 



316 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

miracle of his own sudden conversion repeated 
in the lives of thousands. Gradually there 
drew around him a unique multitude — men 
who had been the terror and curse of a coun- 
try side ; magistrates who had begun by up- 
braiding and denouncing him ; men who had 
been drunkards, profligates, and notorious evil 
livers, whose lives had incontestably been 
changed, and who were ready to stand up in 
every market-place of Great Britain and wit- 
ness to the grace of God. They all witnessed 
one thing — the thing that Wesley witnessed to 
in Aldersgate Street — a supreme spiritual fact 
which outlives every age, and accommodates 
itself to every class of man — the knowledge 
that sin may be forgiven, and that men may 
know it is forgiven. And is not this doctrine 
of experience the one great argument for 
Christian life still? Is not the fact that men 
are somehow converted, and that the whole 
bias of a life is obviously changed by some 
divine process which may happen in a moment, 
as verifiable a fact as any of the facts of mod- 
ern science? Is it not as well worth the atten- 
tion of the philosopher as the life of earth- 
worms or the laws of light ? For Wesley that 
was the fact of all facts, the surest of the sure, 
the clearest of the clear ; the one supreme 
event in a human life ; and Methodism arose 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 317 

out of his passionate desire to declare this 
truth which he had re-discovered. And thus 
from the first — and may it always continue ! — 
Methodism has been built upon fellowship 
rather than doctrinal tests ; upon experience, 
not on dogma ; and hence its elasticity, its 
life, and its extraordinary growth. 

II. Such was the character of Wesley; now 
look at the nature of his work; and there can 
be no better description of that work than this : 
" The common people heard him gladly." To 
estimate that work you have first of all to 
realize what the England of Wesley was like. 
That picture has been drawn for us in unmistak- 
able colors by every writer who has described 
the eighteenth century. It was an age of relig- 
ion without faith, of politics without honor, 
and of life without morality. Robert Walpole 
said, not with noble scorn, but with sincere 
conviction, that every man had his price ; nor 
is there any reason to believe that he ever 
found himself wrong in his estimate of those 
with whom he had to deal. Dr. Johnson again 
tells us of Walpole that he always talked 
grossly at his own table, because he found that 
this was the only species of conversation in 
which all could indulge. There is not a page in 
the biography of the public men of the time 
that does not bear witness to the venality and 



318 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

degradation of public life, and equally to the 
corruption of general morals. When the 
customs of the upper classes were what they 
were it is not surprising that the life of the 
lower classes was inconceivably brutal and de- 
graded. The most instructive commentary on 
lower class customs is found in Hogarth's pict- 
ures and John Wesley's journals. In the Beer 
Street and Gin Lane of the great artist there 
is given the most hideous picture of drunken- 
ness that painter ever drew, and it is drawn 
from the life. In the journals of the great 
evangelist are chronicled the faithful reports 
of an eye-witness who knew the life of En- 
gland as no other man did, from the Tweed to 
Land's End, and what do we gather from his 
pages ? Every-where we read of the ignorance 
and hopelessness of the poor; how the churches 
of those who should have aided him were 
closed against him ; how magistrates did all 
they could to silence him; how every-where 
there were violent mobs ready to rise at the 
first chance of mischief. The inhumanities 
of man to man were inconceivable, and a gen- 
eral moral callousness had ensued. London 
was called the City of the Gallows, for at what- 
ever point you entered it, by land or water, 
you passed through a long lane of gibbets, 
where the corpses of felons hung rotting and 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 3T9 

bleaching in the light. Slavery was encour- 
aged, and slaves were advertised for sale in the 
public press. The press-gang was a constant 
terror. In some parishes every fourth house 
was a tavern, and drunkenness was general 
and unrebuked. For the Church had ceased 
to be a power, and there were clergymen who 
had as little faith in vital Christianity as the 
popes of Luther's day. That was the En- 
gland of Wesley's day ; and is it any wonder 
that immediately on his conversion Wesley's 
humanitarian sympathy was kindled ? 

And yet we cannot but pause again to re- 
member who he was, and what his history had 
been. He was a scholar and a gentleman, a 
man of poetic genius and reflective mind, with 
a strong tendency toward mysticism. His 
natural associates were men of culture, and his 
friendship with Dr. Johnson is the best proof 
of his capacity for pleasing cultured men. But 
from the first he sought to be the apostle of 
the common people. His noble maxim was to 
go, not to those who needed him, but to those 
who needed him most. He saw the multitude 
as sheep having no shepherd, and he had com- 
passion on them. He set himself to care not 
only for their souls, but for their minds and 
bodies. Every modern social movement may 
be found in the germ in Wesley's practice. 



320 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

For the poor he wrote grammars, histories, and 
manuals of medicine ; he translated and 
abridged standard works, publishing some two 
hundred volumes in all; he was the inventor 
of cheap literature, and the first man to print 
his sermons and sow them broadcast. He had 
incomparable common sense and invincible 
courage. He was ready to adopt any plan 
that was for the salvation and welfare of the 
people, and, once decided on a course, no man 
— could turn him back. He had faith in the com- 
M mon people in an age when every man of in- 
telligence either despised or feared them. He 
committed to converted colliers and prize- 
fighters the care of the souls which he had 
plucked as brands from the burning, and his 
trust was seldom betrayed. The work grew, 
and it reads like a romance. In one place the 
clothes are torn from his back by a brutal mob ; 
in another he is struck with stones, and bleed- 
ing, but goes on preaching as though nothing 
had happened ; in yet another a prize-fighter 
is awed by his serenity, and defends him from 
the mob. The fact that the churches were 
closed against him turned out to be an un- 
speakable blessing. He thereupon began to 
preach in the open air, and often to innumer- 
able multitudes. He preached three, four, and 
five times in a day, and often his sermons 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 32 1 

exceeded an hour. He thought nothing of 
traveling sixty to eighty miles a day on horse- 
back. He preached in taverns while his horse 
was baited, on village greens, in streets and 
market-places. We see, as we look back, the 
great silent throngs, as the voice of Wesley 
floats over them in the early morning stillness, 
and we hear the cries of the penitent, and the 
great flood of sound when thousands of voices 
joined in the hymns to which the movement 
had given birth. The common people heard 
him gladly. There was no part of the kingdom 
where at last he was not known and revered. 
There is no part of the civilized world where 
he is not revered to-day ; the world was his 
parish, and the world is his debtor. 

It was said at a recent great council, similar 
to this, that the churches represented there 
had no mission to the common people. The 
Congregational Church was not for the com- 
mon people, but for the " intellectual aris- 
tocracy " of the middle classes. I will not 
pause to ask whether this statement is true or 
justified, but I say it expresses a temper which 
is an outrage on Christianity itself. Christ was 
a common man, his disciples were common 
men, and it was among common people, and 
by their ardor of unconquerable heroism, that 
the Church was founded. Looked at in the 
21 



322 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

highest way, we ought to remember that 
[ Christianity recognizes no class distinctions. 
' We do not minister to classes, we minister to 
the world. But it is obvious enough that com- 
mon people make the vast majority of that 
world, and, therefore, it is to them we must go 
first. Methodism has never known any thing 
of " intellectual aristocracies ; " it is the Church 
of the people. It has sprung from the people ; 
it is supported by the people ; it exists for the 
people ; and the greatest glory which any 
Church can earn is not that intellectual aris- 
tocracies applaud it, but that the common 
people hear it gladly, and by it the poor have 
the Gospel preached to them. 

And the success of Wesley was based on 
two facts : he preached the love of God, and 
he embodied it. It is an entire mistake to 
suppose that he affected the great multitudes 
he addressed by any vivid pictures of hell, or the 
common rant of a cheap and vulgar evangelism. 
A He had as keen a dislike to cant and rant as 
I any man who ever lived. He says he prefers 
a sermon on good temper to what is vulgarly 
called a " gospel sermon/' " The term," says 
he, " has now become a mere cant word. I 
wish none of our society would use it. It has 
no determinative meaning. Let but a pert, 
self-sufficient animal, that has neither sense 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 323 

nor grace, bawl out something about Christ 
and his blood, or justification by faith, and his 
hearers cry out, * What a fine gospel ser- 
mon ! ' ' It is equally a vital error to suppose 
that there was any thing austere and priggish 
in Wesley's Methodism. He says, " Religion 
is love : as it is the happiest, so it is the cheer- 
fulest thing in the world ; it is utterly incon- 
sistent with moroseness, sourness, severity, 
and, indeed, whatever is not according to the 
softness, and sweetness, and gentleness of 
Christ Jesus." He tells his preachers that they 
are to hate nothing but sin. Wherever he 
goes, especially in his later life, he carries with 
him a peculiar serenity, cheerfulness, and vital 
joy. The great message he had for the multi- 
tude was that God loved them, and the multi- 
tude saw in the life of Wesley the evidence 
that God had not forgotten them. George 
Eliot has caught the real tone and spirit of 
early Methodist preaching in her noble and 
pathetic picture of Dinah Morris preaching on 
the village green ; and that was a study from 
the life. When Wesley faced great sinful 
multitudes, his voice quivered as the voice of 
Dinah Morris did, and his words had the same 
yearning of ineffable compassion in them. He 
did not know how to spare himself. At Cardiff 
he says, " My heart was enlarged ; I knew not 



324 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

how to give over, so that we continued three 
hours/' He preaches on his father's tomb at 
Epworth one lovely June evening for " near 
three hours," and this was his fourth service 
in the day. It may almost be said that he re- 
discovered the lost art of preaching to the 
common people and gave it a new lease of 
life. Again, one catches a glimpse of those 
great multitudes, and sees the face of Wesley 
rapt and solemn while he preaches, or we be- 
hold him, as Crabbe Robinson describes him, 
helped into the pulpit in extreme old age by 
two of his brethren — a saintly figure with clear 
eyes and long white hair — to the last testifying 
of the Gospel of the grace of God. Is it won- 
derful that the neglected poor crowded to 
him ? Do they ever fail to crowd to the man 
who comes to them clothed in the compassion 
of Christ? Is it not there that our work as 
ministers and churches still lies ? The common 
people — the ignorant, the poor, the outcast, 
the great unchurched masses for whom the 
decorous worship of the sanctuary has no 
charm, and the formal priest and Levite no balm 
of healing — this is your great constituency, O 
churches ; these are they who need you most ; 
these will repay you with the quickest faith, 
the kindliest welcome, the noblest gratitude ; 
and was it not among these that Christ found 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 325 

almost his only sympathizers, and from them 
selected the apostles who have changed the 
world ? 

III. We glance lastly at the philosophy of 
the growth of Wesley's work. Wesley intro- 
duced a new idea into the life and religious 
thought of the people, and it has taken root 
all over the world, till there are not fewer than 
twenty-five millions that own his spiritual 
sway. His work began in the most insignifi- 
cant of ways, and in this it resembles every 
great religious movement, and even Christian- 
ity itself. And it is at this point that the il- 
lustration of the leaven asserts itself, and we 
see how singularly felicitous it is. What is 
leaven ? It is so humble a force that one can 
scarcely call it a force at all. Yet there is a 
secret potency and pervasiveness about it 
which is omnipotent in its own sphere. When 
once it has begun to ferment it will go on fer- 
menting till the whole mass of dough is leav- 
ened. And in this respect nothing could more 
aptly illustrate the vital force of ideas and of 
spiritual movements. Jesus applies the illus- 
tration to his own words and work, and this is 
the supreme example of its meaning. Think 
of what it means that here are certain words 
of Jesus spoken long since from some obscure 
hill-side of Palestine — words of deep spiritual 



326 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

originality and significance. They were heard 
by a company of peasants in the most insig- 
nificant country of the world. No telegraph 
caught them up and flashed them round the 
globe ; no printing-press, for fourteen centu- 
ries, w r as to give them permanence and cur- 
rency. They were uttered in a slender space 
of time measured by minutes ; the clear air 
stirred with their vibration for a few seconds, 
and then was still again as though no voice 
had spoken. Presently the crowd separated ; 
very soon the Speaker was unjustly condemned 
and his lips were forever silenced on the cross. 
But those words were not lost ; they were 
preserved on something more permanent than 
parchment ; they were stamped on the living 
hearts and memories of men. One by one men 
felt their potency and significance and surren- 
dered to their spell. Yet so slow was the 
process — so silent and gradual — that it seemed 
to the casual onlooker as if nothing had hap- 
pened. It was as Jesus said it would be : men 
would say there was no kingdom of God at 
all, because they were incapable of recognizing 
the progress of silent and secret forces. The 
true strength of those forces we can now meas- 
ure. We know now that ideas are more pow- 
erful than empires ; that he who utters the 
truth has crowned himself with a supremacy 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 327 

which the centuries cannot destroy. Empires 
have perished, the whole face of the world has 
suffered infinite and multitudinous change, but 
the ideas of Jesus live ; they live in added 
strength ; they are as leaven working through 
the hearts and minds of men still, till the 
whole shall be leavened. 

But the force of the text is to teach us not 
only the vitality of ideas but the value of in- 
significance. The kingdom of God is to be vic- 
torious by the aggregation of little things, the 
conversion of peasants, the change which 
passes over the life and thought of innumer- 
able obscure and uninfluential individuals. Is 
not that lesson of the value of insignificance 
one of the lessons continually taught us by the 
brilliant discoveries of modern science ? The 
rain-drop is a little thing, yet it is the power 
of rain-drops to denude continents of their soil 
and to wear a course through the living gran- 
ite and to shatter mountains and literally re- 
move them into the sea. It is the rain-drop 
which has built up in the deltas of the Missis- 
sippi, from the sand and silt of continual 
storm-water, a tract of land larger than Ire- 
land ; it is the rain-drop which is hourly fret- 
ting away the spires and rock-towers of the 
Matterhom, transforming their adamantine 
fronts, and yearly reducing their height and 



328 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

majesty. The sand-storm is a little thing, but 
it can bury cities and cover the Sphinx in a 
thick drift from which no human power can 
extricate it. The particles of the air we 
breathe are so minute as to be actually invis- 
ible, but from their united strength is born the 
storm which wastes forests in its passage and 
overwhelms the stablest works of man with 
desolation. There are a hundred chemic sub- 
stances that appear but as useless dust, and 
yet they have power in them to dissolve the 
toughest metals or wholly change their char- 
acter. There are a hundred organisms so mi- 
nute that the best microscope can hardly dis- 
cover them, but they have power to carry 
death and suffering through an empire and to 
utterly depopulate the most prosperous coun- 
try. Insignificance ! Pray, what is insignifi- 
cant ? Has it not been said that there are 
forces hidden in a dew-drop which, if liberated, 
might wreck a world ? And what is more in- 
significant than the individual man — the poor, 
obscure, human entity, whose days are as a 
shadow that passes away, and whose life is but 
a few troubled breaths between two eternities? 
Yet every great movement which has changed 
the world is the result of changes in the indi^ 
viduals who have first received and then spread 
the force of a single idea. It is so Jesus says 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 329 

his kingdom will come. It will touch individ- 
uals, and through them change the world. 
Men will not know that any thing is happen- 
ing till the kingdom has come ; they will treat 
as insignificant that which is the agent and 
power of God and is his manifestation among 
men. When Christ changes you his kingdom 
has advanced one stage the nearer ; through 
you and me the force will stream on and on 
and touch others ; it will be as the leaven that 
leavens the whole lump. 

To dwell further upon the means by which 
the leaven of truth was spread by Wesley and 
his evangelists is needless. There have been 
brotherhoods and religious orders in the world 
before; but certainly none more extraordinary 
than these early Methodists. They were 
trained to bear suffering without murmur, and 
poverty without complaint. They gladly sub- 
mitted themselves to the rule of Wesley, and 
at his will were moved hither and thither to 
do their great w r ork. How many unknown 
Dinah Morrises have lived and died heroically 
in those early days ! How many gracious 
women have submitted to the yoke of compar- 
ative penury to help the cause for which they 
lived ! How many children have been born 
in this hard Methodist cradle, and have grown 
up to bless the kindly rule of Wesley! And 



330 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

as the page unfolds, we see Wesley's crusaders 
in other hemispheres than ours ; we follow 
Asbury in his rapid pioneer journeys in Amer- 
ica; we see Whitefield standing with the sink- 
ing candle in his hand to the last pleading with 
the people on the night in which he dies ; we 
hear Wesley's soldiers praying with each other 
on European battle-fields ; we watch Coke dy- 
ing just as he sees afar the turrets and battle- 
ments of the great Indian Empire which he 
longed to win for Christ ; we see in latter days 
Fiji civilized and Christianized by the heroic 
labors of Hunt and Calvert; and from strange 
lands there come to us the echoes of the old 
hymns, the record of the old experiences, told 
in the old familiar phrases, which in Wesley's 
day often stirred the souls of thousands as they 
prayed in Gwennap pit, or held their joyous 
love-feasts or solemn watch-nights in many a 
meeting-house of Cornwall or Northumber- 
land. 

" The simplification of life " — that great key- 
note which was struck in the great Revolution, 
and is still heard so clearly in the poetry of 
Wordsworth — was the note which Wesley 
sounded before either. He saw that true riches 
f consisted in the fewness of our wants, not in the 
abundance of our possessions ; and he urged 
on all his converts the utmost frugality of life. 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 33 1 

He himself set the example. It is computed 
that he gave away not less than ^30,000, the 
profits of his publications, and, until he was a 
very old man, he never rode in a chaise. He 
introduced the same note of simplification into 
religion. He thought little of creeds, and — 
never imposed one on his followers. He said, 
" Is thy heart right, as my heart is with thine? 
I ask no further question. If it be, give me 
thine hand. For opinions or terms let us not 
destroy the work of God. Dost thou love 
and serve God? It is enough. I give thee 
the right hand of fellowship." He defined a 
Methodist, in the broadest of terms, as " one 
who lives according to the method laid down 
in the Bible." He wrote once: " The Method- 
ists do not impose, in order to admission into 
their society, any opinions whatever. The 
Presbyterian may be a Presbyterian still ; so 
may the Quaker, and none will contend with 
him about it. They think and let think. 
One condition, and one only, is required — a 
real desire to save their souls." His definition 
of his own work was that he aimed at spread- 
ing scriptural holiness throughout the land. 
He began life with absolute submission to the 
Church ; he ended it with absolute submission -"* 
to the living Christ alone. He knew how to 
descend deep and deeper into himself, till 



332 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

nothing but a clear and undivided voice was 
heard — u a voice that does away with doubt, 
and brings with it persuasion, light, and 
serenity."* He taught that to follow that 
inward voice was life; that for every man 
there was that specific assurance, and in that 
teaching he simplified theology and brushed 
away its technicalities. The result was that 
religion was made clear and simple to the 
most ignorant, and became a thing of free- 
dom, of cheerfulness, of certitude and unfad- 
ing joy. 

But the leaven of Methodism is not seen 
alone in the creation of a sect or Church. It 
has touched and changed all other Churches. 
Its best elements have long ago been incorpo- 
rated into the common life of Christendom. 
It has liberalized the theology of all the 
Churches. Never himself a dogmatist, always 
ready to prefer conduct to creeds, declaring 
himself " the friend of all, and enemy of none," 
animated by national rather than sectarian 
aims, Wesley has been an unmeasured and im- 
measurable power in purifying the religious 
life of the whole world. The man who de- 
clared that doubtless Marcus Aurelius was one 
of those who would sit down in the kingdom 
of Christ when the children of the kingdom 
* AmieTs Journal y p. 10. 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 333 

would be cast out, could not help infusing into 
the life of his nation a new breadth of thought, 
a new tolerance and charity. What he did by 
his preaching Charles Wesley did by his po- 
etry, and it was his glorious task to create a 
magnificent hymnology, in the hospitality of 
whose praise all Churches are united. The 
modern Church of England is the creation 
of Wesley; and, far as it may have traveled 
on lines the opposite of his, it was he who gave 
it the new impulse which makes it a great and 
living power to-day. 

Nor is this all. All historians are now 
agreed that it was Methodism, or, to use the 
larger and more catholic phrase, the evangel- 
ical revival, which saved Great Britain from a 
revolution which might have been as bloody, 
as disastrous, and far more prolonged than 
the French Revolution. The very men who 
would have made magnificent mob-leaders 
Wesley subdued and made class-leaders ; the 
men who would have fought with the feroc- 
ity of mastiffs behind English barricades 
Wesley enlisted in the great crusade of right- 
eousness and made soldiers of Jesus Christ ; 
and while France rang with the fierce music 
of the Marseillaise, sung to a frightful accom- 
paniment of lust and pillage and slaughter, 
John Wesley and his helpers were going up 



334 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

and down the land singing the Marseillaise of 
Methodism: 

' O that the world might taste and see 

The riches of his grace : 
The arms of love that compass me 
Would all mankind embrace." 

And thus, when the great revolution came, 
fifty years of the great revival had done its 
work, and it was only the torn and futile edges 
of the storm-cloud that swept along our 
shores. 

To-night we look back to that simple but 
memorable scene which took place a hundred 
years ago in that little room in City Road. 
Wesley literally died working — 

4< Languor was not in his heart, 
Weakness not in his word, 
Weariness not on his brow." 

In his eighty-fourth year he gave the first 
five days of the New Year to the task of walk- 
ing through the streets of London, soliciting 
alms for the relief of the poor. His last letter 
was a noble protest against the horrors of 
slavery. A few weeks only before his death 
he completed his long literary labors by trans- 
lating for the use of his people a French 
treatise on the happiness of the future state. 
In those last days wherever he appeared in 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 335 

public men regarded him with the veneration 
due to a saint, and to their friendly greetings 
his habitual reply was, " Little children, love 
one another/' It was his custom to conclude 
his meetings in these days with the lines, 

11 O that without a lingering groan 

I may the welcome word receive — 
My body with my charge lay down, 
And cease at once to work and live." 

And his prayer was answered. He preached 
his last sermon on February 23, 1791, and 
came home to die. Never, surely, was the 
place of death more sacred, more lovely, or 
more visibly the vestibule of heaven. It was 
not dying ; it was euthanasia. To the last the 
happy old man sang : 

" I'll praise my Maker while I've breath, 
And when my voice is lost in death, 

Praise shall employ my nobler powers ; 
My days of praise shall ne'er be past 

While life, or thought, or being last, 
Or immortality endures."' 

Then, with the memorable word, u The best 
of all is, God is with us,'', and a whispered 
" Farewell " to one of his best-loved helpers, 
the spirit of Wesley passed to the 'beatific 
vision. 

So passed away John Wesley — the greatest 
religious reformer of modern times. The se- 



336 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

cret of his success is found in his faith, his 
practical sagacity, his boldness of invention, 
above all, in that enthusiasm for humanity 
which possessed him. He started a move- 
ment which communicated its conscious or 
unconscious impulse in turn to Wilberforce 
and Howard, to Raikes and Pounds, and in 
our own day has borne abundant fruit, in a 
thousand lives of sacrifice, in enterprises of 
charity and philanthropy which have covered 
the world, in the gracious development of com- 
passion, in the mitigation of the human lot, in 
the sanctification of the common conscience, 
and the redemption of the general life. For 
all of us life will soon be ended and we shall 
be silent, " gone with the tumult that we made, 
and the rolling and trampling of ever-new gen- 
erations will pass over us, and we shall hear it 
not any more, forever." Upon us each, day 
by day, and more and more, there presses the 
great problem of human misery which Wesley 
sought to solve. We have an organized and 
intelligent Christianity unknown in his day ; 
we have a thousand appliances for the work 
of social redemption which he lacked. Are we 
living in his spirit ? Are we consumed with 
the passion for souls which he felt? Have 
we in us the elements out of which the soldiers 
of this new crusade of Christianity are formed ? 



WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 337 

Or does this saintly and courageous spirit re- 
buke and shame and condemn us for our mani- 
fest unlikeness to his example ? 

To attempt to exhibit the lessons of such a 
life is a needless task. How many are these 
lessons, how easily perceived, and yet how 
hard to learn ! May we, and all Christendom, 
be to-day baptized anew for the dead ! May 
we see with new clearness of vision what it is 
that makes life really great, and what alone 
makes death a triumph. May we learn, in the 
spirit of this great life, to dedicate ourselves 
anew to the service of humanity; and above 
all, may we attain to a stronger and simpler 
faith in the Gospel of Christ when we see how 
mightily it was used by him to the redemption 
of multitudes. Such men are not given only 
for our admiration, but our emulation. We 
cannot do all that they did, and no doubt 
times and opportunities are changed ; but 
how much more can we do than we are doing? 
For the worth of such a service as this is, as I 
have said, not that we laud a man or praise a 
system, but that we measure ourselves beside 
his single-mindedness, his self-sacrifice, his 
heroic devotion, and try to be like him. The 
end of the true evolution is to lift all men to 
an heroic level, to an equality of faith and 
service. That is the great hope which we in- 
22 



338 WESLEY AND HIS WORK. 

herit — the future toward which we move if we 
be worthy. 

u Progress is 
The law of life ; man is not man as yet ; 
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, 
While only here and there a star dispels 
The darkness — here and there a towering mind 
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows ; when the host 
Is out at once to the despair of night, 
When all mankind alike is perfected, 
Equal in full-blown powers — then, not till then, 
I say, begins man's general infancy." 

We see in Wesley the type of a supreme 
consecration ; the vision of a glory which is 
within the reach of all ; a species of eminence 
to which the humblest may attain. Wide dif- 
ferences of degree there may be between us 
and him, but the spirit of his life may be the 
spirit of ours ; and so, though one star differs 
from another star in glory, we may move in a 
common sphere, and shine with the same kind 
of radiance. And behold, " They that be wise 
shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, 
and they that turn many to righteousness as 
the stars for ever and ever." 



THE END. 



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